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Cultural Context of

The Great Gatsby

Understanding the times helps to understand the novel

World War I

• World War I ended in 1918. • Disillusioned because of the war,

the generation that fought and survived has come to be called “the lost generation.”

The Roaring Twenties

• While the sense of loss was readily apparent among expatriate American artists who remained in Europe after the war, back home the disillusionment took a less obvious form.

• America seemed to throw itself headlong into a decade of madcap behavior and materialism, a decade that has come to be called the Roaring Twenties.

The Age of Intolerance

• The losses- both financial and in human- associated with World War I left the United States unwilling to entangle itself again into the affairs of foreign nations.

• The US refusal to join the League of Nations was evidence of this new isolationist policy. Immigration rules and quotas were tightened. There was also a concerted effort to pursue and unmask spies, usually Communists or “Reds”. The “us and them” mentality resulted in the revitalizing of such supremacist oraganizations as the KKK.

The Jazz Age

• The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the music called jazz, promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio, swept up from New Orleans to capture the national imagination.

• Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at the rules of the past.

The New Woman

• Among the rules broken were the age-old conventions guiding the behavior of women. The new woman demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home.

• Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish “bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of the fashionable twenties “flapper.”

Prohibition

• The 18th Amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of “intoxicating liquors” in the US was ratified January 16, 1919 and the Volstead Act, which defined the phrase “intoxicating liquors”, thus making the amendment enforceable, was passed on October 28, 1919. Prohibition began January 16, 1920.

Gambling

• Another gangland activity was illegal gambling.

• Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseball’s World Series.

The Automobile

• The Jazz Age was also an era of reckless spending and consumption, and the most conspicuous status symbol of the time was a flashy new automobile.

• Advertising was becoming the major industry that it is today, and soon advertisers took advantage of new roadways by setting up huge billboards at their sides.

• Both the automobile and a bizarre billboard play important roles in The Great Gatsby.

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

• Born in St. Paul. Minnesota on September 24, the namesake and 2nd cousin 3 times removed from the author of the National Anthem

• His father, Edward Fitzgerald, has charm and elegance but little money. His mother, Mollie McQuillen Fitzgerald, was and Irish immigrant. Her family was financially secure, but she did not prefer society life. Both his father and mother were Catholic. The Fitzgerald’s lived on the outskirts of a wealthy neighborhood, and although Scott played with the rich children, he was never totally accepted by them.

• The family moved to New York in search of work, where his father worked for Proctor & Gamble. When Scott was about 12 years old, they moved back to St. Paul and lived off of Mollie’s inheritance.

• In 1908, Scott entered St. Paul Academy where he excelled in debate and athletics.

• As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine.

• On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

• He joined the Navy and was stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery Alabama.

• In 1918, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with 18-year old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Judge. Zelda refused to marry Scott because he did not have the means to finance the kind of lifestyle she was used to. She waited for a short time, but eventually broke off their engagement.

• Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's in September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.

• One week after the novel’s release, Fitzgerald and Zelda were married in New York. One year later, Zelda gave birth to their only daughter.

• The monies from the sale of This Side of Paradise began to run out so Scott write and sold short stories. He also attempted a play.

• The family lived an extravagant lifestyle that included much drinking and many parties. Their domestic life was turbulent, largely due to the couple’s heavy alcohol consumption, bordering on alcoholism.

• Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern with love and success, his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration — the idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

• Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 . He wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The extent of the affair — if it was in fact consummated — is not known. On the Riviera the Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with affluent and cultured American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy.

• The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.

• In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway — then unknown outside the expatriate literary circle — with whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway’s personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating between Paris and the Riviera.

• Fitzgerald’s peak story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from 160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources averaged under $25,000 a year — good money at a time when a schoolteacher’s average annual salary was $1,299, but not a fortune. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances.

• In 1930, Zelda experienced the first of 3 mental breakdowns. After her breakdown in 1934, she remained institutionalized for the remainder of her life. In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress.

• Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week.  His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous.

• Fitzgerald remained married to Zelda until his death, but while in California, he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. She helped revive Fitzgerald’s writing career and spent the last few years of his life with him.

• Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in 1948.

Other Major Works of Fitzgerald

• This Side of Paradise: published in 1920, was based largely on Fitzgerald's experiences and observations at Princeton.

• The Beautiful and the Damned: published in 1922, was first serialized in Metropolitan Magazine

• Tender is the Night: published in 1932, was set in France during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy mental patient.

• The Last Tycoon: published posthumously in 1941 was his Hollywood novel he had written more than half of a working draft when he died

Critical Overview of the Novel

• How has the reception changed over the

decades?

The 1920s

• While fellow writers praised Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, critics offered less favorable reviews.

Newspaper Reviews

• The Baltimore Evening Sun called the plot “no more than a glorified anecdote” and the characters “mere marionettes.”

• The New York Times called the book “neither profound nor durable.”

• The London Times saw it as “undoubtedly a work of great promise” but criticized its “unpleasant” characters.

The 1930s

• Fitzgerald’s reputation reached its lowest point during the Depression, when he was viewed as a Jazz Age writer whose time has come and gone.

• The Great Gatsby went out of print in 1939.

• When Fitzgerald died a year later, Time magazine didn’t even mention The Great Gatsby.

The 1940s

• Interest in Fitzgerald was revived with the posthumous book, The Last Tycoon.

• A literary critic was the first to point out that Gatsby, despite its Jazz Age setting, focused on timeless, universal concerns.

The 1950s

• Fitzgerald’s reputation soared with a new biography entitled The Far Side of Paradise.

• The London Times affirmed that Gatsby is “one of the best-if not the best-American novels of the past fifty years.”

What is the reputation today?

• The Great Gatsby’s place as a major novel is now assured.• Most high schools teach this novel

It’s time for you to decide,

Old Sport…