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The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
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Context
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor
Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. Fitzgerald was raised in St.
Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New
Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to
enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time
at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I
neared its end.
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Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in
Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty
named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for
wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With
the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation,
earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The
Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man
from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to
New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man
who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while
stationed at a military camp in the South.
Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and
decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly,
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The Great Gatsby
Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to
acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s
love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great
Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled
alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and
sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he
left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love
of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the
Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of
this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of
prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol
mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out
of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties
managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived.
The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation
that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid
conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as
money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day.
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Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting,
and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in
which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the
East. Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral
emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In
many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting
feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman
who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.
©2004 SparkNotes LLC, All Rights Reserved
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The Great Gatsby
Home > Free Study Aids > Study Guides > Literature > The Great Gatsby
Plot Overview
Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922
to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a
wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their
fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish
displays of wealth. Nick ’ s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay
Gatsby , who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every
Saturday night.
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Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social
connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper
class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan ,
and her husband, Tom , an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce
Nick to Jordan Baker , a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic
relationship. Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that
Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson , who lives in the valley of ashes, a gray industrial dumping
ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels
to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom
keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds by breaking
her nose.
As the summer progresses, Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s
legendary parties. He encounters Jordan Baker at the party, and they meet Gatsby himself, a
surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile, and calls
everyone “old sport.” Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, and, through Jordan, Nick later
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