Fitzgerald, Francis Scott - Works

Fitzgerald

He was born in Minnesota in 1896. He began to write and had the opportunity to associate with young rich man.
During the First World War he joined the army and worked to his first novel, This Side of Paradise: the book is concerned about lifestyle of young people in the Roaring Twenties and captures the sense of lost hiding behind the materialism.
This novel had success; it gave him fame and money.
In 1921 he married Zelda and they spent life in New York spending lots of money in parties, alcohol and drugs.
He also went to Paris and on the French Riviera, where he finished the Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The protagonist of this novel is James Gatz, a man who makes every effort to rise about poverty and changes his name into Jay Gatsby.
In the army, he falls in love with Daisy, a beautiful but superficial woman who marries Tom Buchanan, a rich, brutal man.
Later Gatsby makes a fortune as a bootlegger and through other illegal activities.
He buys a magnificent mansion in Long Island, on the opposite side of the bay to Daisy’s house, in hope he will see Daisy turn up one day.
Nick Carraway is Gatsby’s neighbor and Daisy’s cousin. Thanks to him Daisy and Gatsby meet again and have an affair.
After a short period of time , Tom becomes increasingly more suspicious of his wife's relationship with Gatsby and he has a fight with Daisy.
Daisy hide over Tom’s mistress car with Gatsby’s car; Myrtle died and Gatsby is accused: he doesn’t protest innocence to defend Daisy, but she deserts him and reconciles with Tom.
Gatsby is shot in his garden by Myrtle’s husband and nobody comes to his funeral except Nick.

The Great Gatsby is a story of thwarted love between a man and a woman . Although all the ' action takes place in the course of a few months during the summer of 1922 , and takes place in a particular geographical area Nearby Long Island , in New York , The Great Gatsby shows a main theme , the disintegration of American dream in an era of prosperity and unprecedented excesses .
The American dream had been corrupted by the desire for materialism. Gatsby had a pure dream, but became corrupt in his quest toward that dream.

Great Gatsby:
- Romantic hero who died for his dream
- Self-made man who tried to improve his condition

Nick is at the same time observer and participant in the novel. Is also linked to one of the major themes in the novel: the opposition between East and West; he comes from the West, and returns to it by the novel’s end. Also Fitzgerald had origins in the West, which idealized as a being moral land