Author

• Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24^th, 1896
• although being rather mediocre at school, he enrolled at Princeton in 1913 but never graduated and joined the army in 1917 instead
• he became a second lietenant and fell in love at a war camp with Zelda Sayre who agreed to marry him (she delayed the wedding until Fitzgerald proved to be a successful writer due to her want for wealth)
• This Side of Paradise earned him a lot of success and Zeldy finally married him
• Fitzgerald wove a lot his personal experience into The Great Gatsby
  
  • Daisy Buchanan was inspired by Fitzgerald‘s wife Zelda Sayre
  • Nick Carraway has a similar background to Fitzgerald (coming from Minnesota, being thoughtful, attending an Ivy League University, moving to New York after the war)
  • Jay Gatsby also shares some details with Fitzgerald (falling in love with a woman at a war camp, yearning and desire for wealth and luxury)
  • Fitzgerald lived the same lifestyle full of parties and celebrities as Gatsby in order to please Zelda
  • just like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who represented everything he wanted, even though she pointed him towards everything he hated (materialism, moral emptiness and hypocrisy)
• after The Great Depression, Fitzgerald became an alcoholic which clearly affected his writing
• he only published one more novel (Tender is the Night in 1934) and a few short stories which he sold to a newspaper
• while he worked on the novel The Last Tycoon he died due to a heart attack at the age of 44

The Roaring 20s

• The Great Gatsby came into being shortly after World War I and people needed to recover from the horror of it; thus, they felt that it was their right to have fun
• caution and codes of conduct no longer mattered and people basically reinvented themselves
• the American Dream resurfaced during that era: leaving behind poverty and hopelessness and hence moving into the upper class became the new goal
• those who survived the First World War were called members of the Lost Generation (a term first introduced by Gertrude Stein); they compensated the terrible things they had experienced with drinking, dancing or traveling
• this was highly influenced and affected by the Prohibition (the amendment that banned the sale as well as the consupmtion of alcohol)
• Prohibition also paved the way to amassing tremendous wealth through bootlegging
• the time period just before the Great Depression was a time of financial boom and created the career of bondsmen
• newly emancipated women smoked, drinked and danced flapper girls

Modernism

• Modernism: a literary as well as artistic movement that started at the beginning of the 20^th century
• writers focused on the individual, internal experience and questioned the nature of reality as well as they created new literary forms
• modernist elements in Gatsby:
  
  • reference to artist El Greco (an artist of the 16^th century who is called the first modernist)
  • poetic distortions of reality ("grotesque rose", "blue smoke")
  • the appearance of technology in form of cars or telephones which are both dangerous (crime is conducted through telephones, a car ultimately kills Myrtle Wilson) and seductive
• however, the portrayal of characters is more realist than modernist, since Fitzgerald puts them into a satiricial context, thus hinting at the fals promise of the American Dream; also, the characters lack that specific modernist insight into their inner world

Reception

"The clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short chapters." - H.L. Mencken of The Baltimore Evening Sun "A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today." - Edwin Clark of The New York Times

• at the time of publication, The Great Gatsby was not as commercially successful as Fitzgerald‘s other novels such as The Beautiful and Damned
• it only sold sold 21,000 copies and earned Fitzgerald $2000 in the first year after the publication and received very mixed reviews
• Fitzgerald received letters of praise from contemporaries T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather
• yet, he was desperate for public recognition of his normal audience
• some critics felt that the novel was far too constructed when Fitzgerald‘s goal actually was to create a literary work that would prove him to be a serious novelist who could be compared to other great authors of his time
• one of the reasons that The Great Gatsby was not as popular as Fitzgerald wished it to be was the fact that it did not contain a strong female character when - at that time - women tended to be the main audience for novels in general