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Why is the Great Gatsby So important?
Does the Great Gatsby symbolise the American Dream?
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There are several specific reasons why The Great Gatsby is one of the most important fiction works. It’s the most American of American stories. It embodies the American spirit – the American will to reinvent oneself. But it also reveals the American Dream’s destructive power.
- World War I Echoes in The 1920s.
- Speakeasies Flourished When Prohibition failed.
- Prohibition Creates A ‘New Money’ Class.
- The Flapper Was Emerging.
- The Novel Depicts Decay Beneath Decadence.
- New Consumer Culture Leads to A Rise in Advertising.
- The Age of The Automobile Is Reflected in Gatsby’s downfall.
- The Novel Predicts Doom ahead.
Set in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War, as it was then known, Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the ways in which that conflict had transformed American society. The war left Europe devastated and marked the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world. From 1920 to 1929, America enjoyed an economic boom, with a ste...
Beginning in early 1920, the U.S. government began enforcing the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale and manufacture of “intoxicating liquors.” But banning alcohol didn’t stop people from drinking; instead, speakeasiesand other illegal drinking establishments flourished, and people like the Fitzgeralds made “bathtub gin” to fuel their liquor-soak...
As their wealth grew, many Americans of the 1920s broke down the traditional barriers of society. This, in turn, provoked anxiety among upper-class plutocrats (represented in the novel by Tom Buchanan). In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice (as G...
By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. But while later Hollywood versions of Gatsby channeled flapper style, the novel itself actually captures a comparatively conservative moment, as 1922...
Just as Gatsby’s shifty business partner, Meyer Wolfsheim, was based on the real-life New York gangster Arnold Rothstein, widely believe to have fixed the 1919 World Series, the growing crime and corruption of the Prohibition era is strongly reflected in The Great Gatsby. In Churchwell’s book, she resurrects a real-life crime that made headlines in...
Though not all Americans were rich, many more people than before had money to spend. And there were more and more consumer goods to spend it on, from automobiles to radios to cosmetics to household appliances like vacuums and washing machines. With the arrival of new goods and technologies came a new consumer culture driven by marketing and adverti...
Cars had been invented early in the 20th century, but they became ubiquitous in the 1920s, as lower prices and the advent of consumer credit enabled more and more Americans to buy their own. The liberating (and destructive) potential of the automobile is clear in The Great Gatsby, as Gatsby’s flashy, expensive car becomes the source of his downfall...
Gatsby’s dreams of winning Daisy for himself end in failure, just as America’s era of prosperity would come to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. By 1930, 4 million Americans were unemployed; that number would reach 15 million by 1933, the Depression’s lowest point. By 1924, when Fitzgerald ...
- Sarah Pruitt
- 2 min
Why is the American Dream so important to The Great Gatsby? We analyze the role this key theme plays in the novel, using quotes, plot, and characters.
In “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald examines the cultural landscape of the Roaring Twenties, a time marked by prosperity and moral decay. While the surface glitters with tales of wealth and success, Fitzgerald exposes the darker side of the American Dream.
PDF Cite. The Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age began shortly after World War I and concluded with the 1929 stock market crash. Following their victory, America experienced a...
Oct 21, 2024 · Set in the Jazz Age (a term popularized by Fitzgerald), The Great Gatsby vividly captures its historical moment: the economic boom in America after World War I, the new jazz music, the free-flowing illegal liquor.
Mar 30, 2021 · Although he is known for having been played in film adaptations by Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the novel does not state that Gatsby is an African American, the scholar Carlyle V. Thompson has suggested that certain clues or codes in the novel strongly hint at Gatsby being a black American who has had to make his own way in the ...
