Francis Scott Fitzgerald & Ernest Hemingway

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald 1896-1940

He was famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle was full of excesses, decadence, drinking and parties, and also the pursuit of pleasure. He was born on September 24 and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he was a mediocre student, but he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic trouble and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end. He became a second lieutenant and was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old named Zelda Sayre. She agreed to marry him, but her desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success, which arrived with the publication of The Side of Paradise in 1920. Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.

Many events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Fitzgerald also shares some characteristics with the main character of the book, Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South.

Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed the Jazz Age, and The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. After The Great Gatsby brought him literary celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless lifestyle of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. As the Roaring Twenties left space for the Great Depression, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing.

He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937 he left for Hollywood to write screenplays and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.

The Great Gatsby 1925

It is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. Considered to be Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby explores themes of idealism, decadence, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream. The novel is composed of nine chapters whose narrator is Nick Carraway.

• It is the story of a self-made young man whose dream of success, personified in a rich and beautiful young woman named Daisy, turns out to be a fantasy in every sense: Daisy belongs to a corrupt society, Gatsby corrupts himself in the quest for her, and above all, the rich have no intention of sharing their privileges.
• The novel is narrated from the point of view of Nick, an onlooker who is both moved and repelled by the tale he tells and whose responses form a sort of subplot. This experiment in narrative point of view was widely imitated.
• The structure of the novel is compact; the style dazzling; and its images of automobiles, parties, and garbage heaps seem to capture the contradictions of a consumer society. It became an instant classic and remains so to this day.

Plot

Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Village district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg, Nick was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island where the established upper class live. One night Nick drives out to East Egg to have dinner with his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, who attended Yale with Nick. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship and who tells Nick a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes, an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle and during a vulgar party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy and he responds by breaking her nose.

As the summer progresses, Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties, where he encounters Jordan Baker and they meet Gatsby himself, a surprisingly young man who affects an English accent, has a remarkable smile and calls everyone "old sport". Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan alone, who later reveals something about Gatsby to Nick: Gatsby told Jordan that he met Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and he is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion, and his extravagant lifestyle and wild parties are simply an attempt to impress Daisy. Gatsby wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that she will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. So Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby will also be there; after an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection, their love rekindled and they begin an affair.

After a short time, Tom grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Gatsby and during a luncheon at the Buchanans’ house Gatsby stares at Daisy with such passion that Tom realizes he is in love with her. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he cannot accept the idea that his could be unfaithful to him, so he forces the group to drive into New York City, where he confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Tom asserts that he and Daisy have a history that Gatsby could never understand and he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal and his fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities; Daisy realizes that her allegiance is to Tom, who sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot hurt him. When Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive through the valley of ashes, they discover that Gatsby’s car has struck and killed Myrtle, Tom’s lover; so they rush back to Long Island where Nick learns from Gatsby that Daisy was driving the car, but that Gatsby intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car and George, who takes the conclusion that whoever killed Myrtle must have been her lover, finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He then fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest to escape the disgust he feels for the people surrounding Gatsby’s life and for the emptiness and moral decay of life among the wealthy on the East Coast. Nick notes that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth. Though Gatsby’s power to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him great. In the end, Nick reflects that the era of dreaming—both Gatsby’s and the American dream— is over.

Characters

Jay Gatsby: The main character is a young man, around thirty years old, who rose from an impoverished childhood in North Dakota to become fabulously wealthy, even though he achieved this goal by participating in organized crime, including distributing illegal alcohol and trading in stolen security. Though Gatsby has always wanted to be rich, his main motivation in acquiring his fortune was his love for Daisy, whom he met as a young military officer in Louisville before leaving to fight in World War I in 1917. Gatsby immediately fell in love with Daisy’s aura of luxury, grace, and charm and lied to her about his own background in order to convince her that he was good enough for her. She promised to wait for him when he left for the war, but married Tom Buchanan in 1919, while Gatsby was studying at Oxford in an attempt to gain an education. From that moment on, Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back and his acquisition of wealth, his purchase of the mansion on West Egg, and his weekly parties are all merely means to that end. Most of this information is introduced fairly late in the novel, Gatsby’s reputation precedes him and he does not appear in a speaking role until Chapter 3. Fitzgerald initially presents him as the aloof, enigmatic host of the extravagant parties thrown at his mansion, he appears surrounded by luxury, courted by powerful men and beautiful women, and he is the subject of many gossips throughout.