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THE GREAT GATSBY – COMPILATION OF ANALYSIS

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The jazz age: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age The 1920’s saw a break with the traditional set-up in America. The Great War had destroyed old perceived social conventions and new ones developed. Fitzgerald's personal history is mirrored in the characters of Jay Gatsby and narrator Nick Carraway. Nick is both mesmerized and disgusted by Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle, which is similar to how Fitzgerald claimed to feel about the "Jazz Age" excesses that he himself adopted. As an Ivy League educated, middle-class Midwesterner, Fitzgerald (like Nick) saw through the shallow materialism of the era. But (like Gatsby) Fitzgerald came back from World War I and fell in love with a wealthy southern socialite – Zelda Sayre.

The 1920s have many names in America: the Roaring Twenties, the Boom, the Jazz Age (the name Fitzgerald himself invented). It was a period of wild economic prosperity, cultural flowering and a shaking up of social mores. It was also the defining era of Fitzgerald's life as a writer. He reached the peak of his fame with the 1925 publication of The Great Gatsby, a book that perfectly captured the era's moods and styles. The fun lasted for ten years and then, as Fitzgerald so eloquently put it, "leaped to a spectacular death in October 1929."5Two years after the crash Fitzgerald eulogized the period in an essay entitled "Echoes of the Jazz Age," writing that "the present writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War."6

The 1920s dawned on an America ready for peace and prosperity. The evil of war had been defeated, and the next great threat in Europe was not yet visible on the horizon. A booming stock market contributed to a huge growth in consumer spending, as investors saw