1920s great gatsby essay

More than any other author, F. Scott Fitzgerald can be said to have captured the rollicking, tumultuous decade known as the Roaring Twenties , from its wild parties, dancing and illegal drinking to its post-war prosperity and its new freedoms for women. The war left Europe devastated, and marked the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world. From to , America enjoyed an economic boom , with a steady rise in income levels, business growth, construction and trading on the stock market. The Marlborough House, a speakeasy haven for drinking socialites during prohibition. Beginning in early , the U.

Introduction

Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse them of frugality. In the young couple he was twenty-seven, she was twenty-three set sail for France.

Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica , they rented an enormous stone villa that rested 2. Ironically, it was there—some thousand miles away from home, in his comfortable perch in the French Mediterranean—that Scott wrote what was arguably the most important American novel of the age: The Great Gatsby. In many ways, the novel was emblematic of its time. If you want to know what that lie was, read the novel!

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald exposed the excesses of the s—a prosperous age in which many Americans came to enjoy the blessings of consumerism and excess, only to see it all crash around them with the Great Depression that arrived in At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach. On week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city.

And on Mondays eight servants, including a extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Consider the context in which Fitzgerald was writing: America in the s was undergoing dynamic changes. From a relative standpoint, America was rich, and it showed. Whereas only 16 percent of American households were electrified in , by the mid-twenties almost two-thirds had electricity. This meant that the average family could replace hours of manual toil and primitive housekeeping with the satisfying hum of the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine, all of which came into wide use during the twenties.

All the while, the number of telephone lines almost doubled, from to Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took over one hundred years for the US Patent Office to issue its millionth patent in ; within fifteen years it issued its two millionth. Americans were also able to buy vast quantities of mass-produced glassware, jewelry, clothing, household items, and durable goods, which blurred the distinctions between rich and poor. Americans in the s were also obsessed with a new cult of celebrity.

The decade gave rise to sports legends like Babe Ruth, who was just as renowned for his voracious appetite as for his homerun record, and Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion who by the mids appeared in almost as many films as he did title fights. Whereas the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers combined published an average of thirty-six biographical profiles each year between and , in the decade after World War I that figure climbed to about sixty-six profiles annually.

Before almost three-quarters of these articles featured political and business leaders; now, over half concerned key figures in entertainment and sports.

The genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald was his ability to cultivate his own image in the media. The genius of his signature character, Jay Gatsby, was his ability to create a veil of celebrity that masked his true origins. But for all the dynamism of the age, Americans did not unqualifiedly embrace the Jazz Age.

If they enjoyed its prosperity, they also feared its social consequences. The rise of premarital sex, the entry of women into the workplace, the breakdown of traditional religious mores, and the influx of millions of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe gave rise to a powerful backlash. Thus, the same decade that gave rise to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald also witnessed a powerful backlash. Conservative Christians formed Fundamentalist churches and sought to restore God to his traditional place in homes and schools.

There was, in short, a deep and pervasive contradiction—and many Americans sensed it. Fitzgerald was a perfect chronicler of his time. He was both an avid participant in, and a stringent critic of, the culture of prosperity that marked the s. In Gatsby, his alter ego, Nick Caraway, recalls wistfully the America of his youth.

I am part of that. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. By , a majority of Americans lived in cities. The world that Fitzgerald chronicled came crashing down on October 29, That was Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed.

The boom economy went bust. Actually, the stock market crash had very little to do with the onset of the Great Depression. Very few Americans in the s owned stocks or securities. Low wages, high rates of seasonal unemployment, chronic stagnation in the agricultural sector, and a hopelessly unequal distribution of wealth were the darker story that lurked behind s-era prosperity.

Good times relied on good sales, after all. The same farmers and workers who fueled economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny new cars and electric washing machines had reached their limit. Unpurchased consumer items languished on the shelves.

Factories cut their production. Workers were laid off by the millions. The good times were over. The Great Gatsby continues to fascinate and grip Americans today. In an era much like the s—one in which we have come to enjoy new levels of comfort and convenience, in which we celebrate celebrity and opulence, but in which there remain glaring inequalities of wealth and privilege— Gatsby is more relevant than ever.

He is currently writing a joint biography of John Hay and John Nicolay. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess. Discussion 1. Login to post comments. Add comment Login to post comments.

Free Essay: Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and the 20s After a time of prosperity, the roaring 's became a decade of social decay and declining moral values. He is the author of the famous novel “ The Great Gatsby”, which is written in the 's. The period of the 's is well known as the roaring twenties due to lack​.

Munns Matt Mr. This novel exemplifies how the characters live for money and are controlled by it. Love and happiness cannot be bought, no matter how much money was spent. Tom and Daisy were married and even had a child, but they both still committed adultery. Daisy was with Gatsby and Tom was with Myrtle.

In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald offers up commentary on a variety of themes — justice, power, greed, betrayal, the American dream, and so on. Of all the themes, perhaps none is more well developed than that of social stratification.

Through his incisive analysis and condemnation of s high society, Fitzgerald in the person of the novels narrator, Nick Carraway argues that the Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene

The American Dream In The Great Gatsby Essay

The s is the decade in American history known as the "roaring twenties. Booming parties, prominence, fresh fashion trends, and the excess of alcohol are all aspects of life in the "roaring twenties. Gatsby displays his prominent fortune by throwing grand parties. In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings of champagne and the stars On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all the trains Fitzgerald

8 Ways 'The Great Gatsby' Captured the Roaring Twenties—and Its Dark Side

SparkNotes is here for you with everything you need to ace or teach! Find out more. It was a decade of tremendous wealth in the United States following the deprivations of the First World War, and the upper-class characters of Gatsby exemplify the hedonism of the era. He mentions the many new technologies beginning to be popularized at the time such as automobiles, radio, movies, as well as the growing influence of the financial markets in New York. His insight into what is often described as a period of superficial frivolity make the novel a lasting emblem of the era. The decade of the s is also often called the Jazz Age, a time when musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong brought jazz music to a mainstream audience. Jazz musicians were almost always black, and their popularity carried complex political ramifications because s America was still highly segregated. Most of the United States lived under Jim Crow, a series of laws and social codes that forced black Americans to live, work, and learn separately from whites. The Great Gatsby reflects the racist attitudes and anxieties of the times. The white, wealthy main characters listen to jazz music but do not socialize with black New Yorkers, and, in a particularly troubling passage, Nick expresses derisive amazement to see a fancy car with black passengers driven by a white chauffeur.

Scott Fitzgerald is an American novelist and a short story writer.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald weaves a memorable tale about moral corruption during the s.

Essay about 1920's in The Great Gatsby

One of the most well-known works of literature from the 20th century is F. The Great Gatsby is both an inspired work of fiction and an influential historical work, and will. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald implores his readers to create meaning through his thought-provoking metaphors and vivid imagery. The Great Gatsby examines the roots of these desires, as well as their effect on the characters. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an author who wrote several books based around his time of life. The Great Gatsby is written to reproduce the environment that Fitzgerald was living in. This semiautobiographical work uses fictitious characters to portray how people around Fitzgerald acted and what the overall theme of. Scott Fitzgerald is set in the s America, New York - a class society of money -, depicts a society which exists in a state of moral confusion and chaos, through the eyes of the narrator; Nick Carraway. This chaos continues to grow through the. The s in The Great Gatsby The s was an age of rebellion and freedom. No one could deny the energy of the young generation and their youthful decisions.

Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and the 20s Essay

Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse them of frugality. In the young couple he was twenty-seven, she was twenty-three set sail for France. Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica , they rented an enormous stone villa that rested 2. Ironically, it was there—some thousand miles away from home, in his comfortable perch in the French Mediterranean—that Scott wrote what was arguably the most important American novel of the age: The Great Gatsby.