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The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story on the surface, but it's most commonly understood as a pessimistic critique of the American Dream. In the novel, Jay Gatsby overcomes his poor past to gain an incredible amount of money and a limited amount of social cache in 1920s NYC, only to be rejected by the "old money" crowd. He then gets killed after being tangled up with them.

Through Gatsby's life, as well as that of the Wilsons', Fitzgerald critiques the idea that America is a meritocracy where anyone can rise to the top with enough hard work. We will explore how this theme plays out in the plot, briefly analyze some key quotes about it, as well as do some character analysis and broader analysis of topics surrounding the American Dream in The Great Gatsby.

Roadmap

1. What is the American Dream?

2. The American Dream in the Great Gatsby plot

3. Key American Dream quotes

4. Analyzing characters via the American Dream

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book. To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

What Exactly Is "The American Dream"?

The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of race, class, gender, or nationality, can be successful in America (read: rich) if they just work hard enough. The American Dream thus presents a pretty rosy view of American society that ignores problems like systemic racism and misogyny, xenophobia, tax evasion or state tax avoidance, and income inequality. It also presumes a myth of class equality, when the reality is America has a pretty well-developed class hierarchy.

The 1920s in particular was a pretty tumultuous time due to increased immigration (and the accompanying xenophobia), changing women's roles (spurred by the right to vote, which was won in 1919), and extraordinary income inequality. The country was also in the midst of an economic boom, which fueled the belief that anyone could "strike it rich" on Wall Street. However, this rapid economic growth was built on a bubble which popped in 1929. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, well before the crash, but through its wry descriptions of the ultra-wealthy, it seems to somehow predict that the fantastic wealth on display in 1920s New York was just as ephemeral as one of Gatsby's parties.

In any case, the novel, just by being set in the 1920s, is unlikely to present an optimistic view of the American Dream, or at least a version of the dream that's inclusive to all genders, ethnicities, and incomes. With that background in mind, let's jump into the plot!

The American Dream in The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1 places us in a particular year - 1922 - and gives us some background about WWI. This is relevant, since the 1920s is presented as a time of hollow decadence among the wealthy, as evidenced especially by the parties in Chapters 2 and 3. And as we mentioned above, the 1920s were a particularly tense time in America.

We also meet George and Myrtle Wilson in Chapter 2, both working class people who are working to improve their lot in life, George through his work, and Myrtle through her affair with Tom Buchanan.

We learn about Gatsby's goal in Chapter 4: to win Daisy back. Despite everything he owns, including fantastic amounts of money and an over-the-top mansion, for Gatsby, Daisy is the ultimate status symbol. So in Chapter 5, when Daisy and Gatsby reunite and begin an affair, it seems like Gatsby could, in fact, achieve his goal.

In Chapter 6, we learn about Gatsby's less-than-wealthy past, which not only makes him look like the star of a rags-to-riches story, it makes Gatsby himself seem like someone in pursuit of the American Dream, and for him the personification of that dream is Daisy.

However, in Chapters 7 and 8, everything comes crashing down: Daisy refuses to leave Tom, Myrtle is killed, and George breaks down and kills Gatsby and then himself, leaving all of the "strivers" dead and the old money crowd safe. Furthermore, we learn in those last chapters that Gatsby didn't even achieve all his wealth through hard work, like the American Dream would stipulate - instead, he earned his money through crime. (He did work hard and honestly under Dan Cody, but lost Dan Cody's inheritance to his ex-wife.)

In short, things do not turn out well for our dreamers in the novel! Thus, the novel ends with Nick's sad meditation on the lost promise of the American Dream. You can read a detailed analysis of these last lines in our summary of the novel's ending.
This novel is just one very large burst bubble.
Key American Dream Quotes

In this section we analyze some of the most important quotes that relate to the American Dream in the book.

But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. (1.152)

In our first glimpse of Jay Gatsby, we see him reaching towards something far off, something in sight but definitely out of reach. This famous image of the green light is often understood as part of The Great Gatsby's meditation on The American Dream - the idea that people are always reaching towards something greater than themselves that is just out of reach. You can read more about this in our post all about the green light. The fact that this yearning image is our introduction to Gatsby foreshadows his unhappy end and also marks him as a dreamer, rather than people like Tom or Daisy who were born with money and don't need to strive for anything so far off.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . . ."

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder. (4.55-8)

Early in the novel, we get this mostly optimistic illustration of the American Dream - we see people of different races and nationalities racing towards NYC, a city of unfathomable possibility. This moment has all the classic elements of the American Dream - economic possibility, racial and religious diversity, a carefree attitude. At this moment, it does feel like "anything can happen," even a happy ending.

However, this rosy view eventually gets undermined by the tragic events later in the novel. And even at this point, Nick's condescension towards the people in the other cars reinforces America's racial hierarchy that disrupts the idea of the American Dream. There is even a little competition at play, a "haughty rivalry" at play between Gatsby's car and the one bearing the "modish Negroes." Nick "laughs aloud" at this moment, suggesting he thinks it's amusing that the passengers in this other car see them as equals, or even rivals to be bested. In other words, he seems to firmly believe in the racial hierarchy Tom defends in Chapter 1, even if it doesn't admit it honestly.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (6.134)

This moment explicitly ties Daisy to all of Gatsby's larger dreams for a better life - to his American Dream. This sets the stage for the novel's tragic ending, since Daisy cannot hold up under the weight of the dream Gatsby projects onto her. Instead, she stays with Tom Buchanan, despite her feelings for Gatsby. Thus when Gatsby fails to win over Daisy, he also fails to achieve his version of the American Dream. This is why so many people read the novel as a somber or pessimistic take on the American Dream, rather than an optimistic one.

...as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." (9.151-152)

The closing pages of the novel reflect at length on the American Dream, in an attitude that seems simultaneously mournful, appreciative, and pessimistic. It also ties back to our first glimpse of Gatsby, reaching out over the water towards the Buchanan's green light. Nick notes that Gatsby's dream was "already behind him" then, in other words, it was impossible to attain. But still, he finds something to admire in how Gatsby still hoped for a better life, and constantly reached out toward that brighter future.

For a full consideration of these last lines and what they could mean, see our analysis of the novel's ending.

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Analyzing Characters Through the American Dream

An analysis of the characters in terms of the American Dream usually leads to a pretty cynical take on the American Dream.

Most character analysis centered on the American Dream will necessarily focus on Gatsby, George, or Myrtle (the true strivers in the novel), though as we'll discuss below, the Buchanans can also provide some interesting layers of discussion. For character analysis that incorporates the American Dream, carefully consider your chosen character's motivations and desires, and how the novel does (or doesn't!) provide glimpses of the dream's fulfillment for them.

Gatsby

Gatsby himself is obviously the best candidate for writing about the American Dream - he comes from humble roots (he's the son of poor farmers from North Dakota) and rises to be notoriously wealthy, only for everything to slip away from him in the end. Many people also incorporate Daisy into their analyses as the physical representation of Gatsby's dream.

However, definitely consider the fact that in the traditional American Dream, people achieve their goals through honest hard work, but in Gatsby's case, he very quickly acquires a large amount of money through crime. Gatsby does attempt the hard work approach, through his years of service to Dan Cody, but that doesn't work out since Cody's ex-wife ends up with the entire inheritance. So instead he turns to crime, and only then does he manage to achieve his desired wealth.

So while Gatsby's story arc resembles a traditional rags-to-riches tale, the fact that he gained his money immorally complicates the idea that he is a perfect avatar for the American Dream. Furthermore, his success obviously doesn't last - he still pines for Daisy and loses everything in his attempt to get her back. In other words, Gatsby's huge dreams, all precariously wedded to Daisy ("He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God" (6.134)) are as flimsy and flight as Daisy herself.

George and Myrtle Wilson

This couple also represents people aiming at the dream - George owns his own shop and is doing his best to get business, though is increasingly worn down by the harsh demands of his life, while Myrtle chases after wealth and status through an affair with Tom.
In the end, everything goes horribly wrong for both George and Myrtle, suggesting that in this world, it's dangerous to strive for more than you're given.
Both are disempowered due to the lack of money at their own disposal - Myrtle certainly has access to some of the "finer things" through Tom but has to deal with his abuse, while George is unable to leave his current life and move West since he doesn't have the funds available. He even has to make himself servile to Tom in an attempt to get Tom to sell his car, a fact that could even cause him to overlook the evidence of his wife's affair. So neither character is on the upward trajectory that the American Dream promises, at least during the novel.

George and Myrtle's deadly fates, along with Gatsby's, help illustrate the novel's pessimistic attitude toward the American Dream. After all, how unfair is it that the couple working to improve their position in society (George and Myrtle) both end up dead, while Tom, who dragged Myrtle into an increasingly dangerous situation, and Daisy, who killed her, don't face any consequences? And on top of that they are fabulously wealthy? The American Dream certainly is not alive and well for the poor Wilsons.

Tom and Daisy as Antagonists to the American Dream

We've talked quite a bit already about Gatsby, George, and Myrtle - the three characters who come from humble roots and try to climb the ranks in 1920s New York. But what about the other major characters, especially the ones born with money? What is their relationship to the American Dream?

Specifically, Tom and Daisy have old money, and thus they don't need the American Dream, since they were born with America already at their feet.

Perhaps because of this, they seem to directly antagonize the dream - Daisy by refusing Gatsby, and Tom by helping to drag the Wilsons into tragedy.

This is especially interesting because unlike Gatsby, Myrtle, and George, who actively hope and dream of a better life, Daisy and Tom are described as bored and "careless," and end up instigating a large amount of tragedy through their own recklessness.

In other words, income inequality and the vastly different starts in life the characters have strongly affected their outcomes. The way they choose to live their lives, their morality (or lack thereof), and how much they dream doesn't seem to matter. This, of course, is tragic and antithetical to the idea of the American Dream, which claims that class should be irrelevant and anyone can rise to the top.

What's Next?
Ready to continue exploring this topic? Get more analysis and discussion of the American Dream in part 2 of this series!

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Best Analysis: The American Dream in The Great Gatsby (Part 1)

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The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story on the surface, but it's most commonly understood as a pessimistic critique of the American Dream. In the novel, Jay Gatsby overcomes his poor past to gain an incredible amount of money and a limited amount of social cache in 1920s NYC, only to be rejected by the "old money" crowd.

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The Great Gastby   Basic Overview & Intro

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A Psychoanalysis of Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby)

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The young, fashionable women of the 1920s define the dress and style of their peers in their own words

smithsonian.com

In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate.

Then the 1920s hit and things changed rapidly. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Women began attending college. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Alice Paul in 1923. World War I was over and men wanted their jobs back. Women, though, who had joined the workforce while the men were at war, had tasted the possibility of life beyond homemaking and weren't ready to relinquish their jobs. Prohibition was underway with the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1919 and speakeasies were plentiful if you knew where to look. Motion pictures got sound, color and talking sequences. The Charleston's popularity contributed to a nationwide dance craze. Every day, more women got behind the wheels of cars. And prosperity abounded.

All these factors-freedoms experienced from working outside the home, a push for equal rights, greater mobility, technological innovation and disposable income-exposed people to new places, ideas and ways of living. Particularly for women, personal fulfillment and independence became priorities-a more modern, carefree spirit where anything seemed possible.

The embodiment of that 1920s free spirit was the flapper, who was viewed disdainfully by an older generation as wild, boisterous and disgraceful. While this older generation was clucking its tongue, the younger one was busy reinventing itself, and creating the flapper lifestyle we now know today.

It was an age when, in 1927, 10-year-old Mildred Unger danced the Charleston on the wing of an airplane in the air. What drove that carefree recklessness? For the most authentic descriptions that not only define the flapper aesthetic, but also describe the lifestyle, we turn to flappers themselves.

In A Flapper's Appeal to Parents, which appeared in the December 6, 1922, issue of Outlook Magazine, the writer and self-defined flapper Elllen Welles Page makes a plea to the older generation by describing not only how her outward appearance defines her flapperdom, but also the challenges that come with committing to a flapper lifestyle.

If one judge by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit. I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. (And, oh, what a comfort it is!), I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright-colored sweaters, and scarfs, and waists with Peter Pan collars, and low-heeled "finale hopper" shoes. I adore to dance. I spend a large amount of time in automobiles. I attend hops, and proms, and ball-games, and crew races, and other affairs at men's colleges. But none the less some of the most thoroughbred superflappers might blush to claim sistership or even remote relationship with such as I. I don't use rouge, or lipstick, or pluck my eyebrows. I don't smoke (I've tried it, and don't like it), or drink, or tell "peppy stories." I don't pet.

But then-there are many degrees of flapper. There is the semi-flapper; the flapper; the superflapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.

She concludes with:

I want to beg all you parents, and grandparents, and friends, and teachers, and preachers-you who constitute the "older generation"-to overlook our shortcomings, at least for the present, and to appreciate our virtues. I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you that it required brains to become and remain a successful flapper? Indeed it does! It requires an enormous amount of cleverness and energy to keep going at the proper pace. It requires self- knowledge and self-analysis. We must know our capabilities and limitations. We must be constantly on the alert. Attainment of flapperhood is a big and serious undertaking!

The July 1922 edition of Flapper Magazine, whose tagline was "Not for old fogies," contained "A Flappers' Dictionary." According to an uncredited author, "A Flapper is one with a jitney body and a limousine mind."

And from the 1922 "Eulogy on the Flapper," one of the most well-known flappers, Zelda Fitzgerald, paints this picture:

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends-it needs only crowds.

While these descriptions provide a sense of the look and lifestyle of a flapper, they don't address how we began using the term itself. The etymology of the word, while varied, can be traced back to the 17th century. A few contenders for early usages of the term include:

A young bird, or wild duck, that's flapping its wings as it's learning to fly. (Consider how dancing the Charleston is reminiscent of a bird flapping its wings.)

A prostitute or immoral woman.

A wild, flighty young woman.

A woman who refused to fasten her galoshes and the unfastened buckles flapped as she walked.

While the origin story differs depending on where you look, cumulatively, they all contribute to our perceptions of this independent woman of the 1920s. In the posts that follow, we'll turn our attention to how those parameters set forth by Ellen, Zelda and Flapper Magazine are reflected in women's attire we now associate with the 1920s, from undergarments to makeup and hair.

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About Emily Spivack

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The History of the Flapper, Part 1: A Call for Freedom

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smithsonian.com In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald - Quotes, Books & Facts

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American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel ‘The Great Gatsby.’

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Videoquiz The Great Gatsby. language. Marie-Hélène Fasquel - E...

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Videoquiz The Great Gatsby. language, literature, L2. Marie-Hélène Fasquel. Flipped class.

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'The Great Gatsby': The American Dream, TJ Eckleburg, & Money

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18. Crash course by John Green (fun video)

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18. Crash course by John Green (fun video)

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John Green explores F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby. John introduces you to Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and the other characters in the novel, and tries to 
look beyond the surface story to figure out what this thing is ABOUT.

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Like Pale Gold - The Great Gatsby Part 1: Crash Course English Literature #4

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The words "literary analysis" drop from your instructor's mouth, and you freeze in terror. The Great Gatsby is one of those books that resonates throughout the ages-that's why you're reading it and writing about it for your class-but you certainly don't feel comfortable enough with the novel to write a literary analysis.

Well, don't sweat it too much-I've got your back.

I'll give you 8 helpful tips for writing a good literary analysis on The Great Gatsby. You can mix and match or simply use this list as a starting point for your own ideas.

Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

Symbolism is when an object represents something different than what it actually is. The Great Gatsby is full of symbolism. The two symbols I mention below are important elements within the story, and you could easily write a whole paper on just one of them.

Tip #1: Analyze the symbolism of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg

The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are painted on a fading billboard in the Valley of Ashes. Many analyses quickly draw the conclusion that Eckleburg represents God, and that both are all-seeing. This is a good analysis, but let's try to go a little deeper.

What does it say that these all-seeing eyes have no arms, legs, or mouth? Does this mean that Eckleburg, as a God-like entity, doesn't have the ability to punish people but to only watch their transgressions?

Also, does the fact that this is a billboard mean anything? Fitzgerald may be trying to say that consumerism was the real god of the era. The 1920s were years when consumerism was becoming more integral, taking over almost every facet of people's daily lives. If these eyes were painted on the side of a building, that interpretation wouldn't be the same. Writers use symbols intentionally and for a specific reason. So pay attention to the specifics!

Tip #2: Pay close attention to Fitzgerald's use of color

Fitzgerald uses a few colors throughout the book, and their prevalence is no accident.

Green, such as the green light on the end of Daisy's dock, represents hope for the future.

Gray, such as in the Valley of Ashes, represents lifelessness and nothingness.

Gold and yellow are interesting and used a whole lot throughout the book. Gold is a symbol for money. Daisy, who is from a well-to-do family and who is married to a rich man is described as a "golden girl" with a voice that's "full of money." She has gold all around her as do many of the other rich people.

Yellow, on the other hand, is a color associated with Gatsby, as shown by his car. Yellow is almost gold but still of lesser value, which is how the other rich people in the novel view Gatsby. He doesn't quite fit in because he's "new money," which in their minds is inferior.

Point of View in The Great Gatsby

There are three points of view in literature: first-person, second-person, and third-person.

First-person point of view is when a story is told from a character's perspective. This involves a lot of "I" and "me" language.

Second-person point of view is when the author addresses the reader directly using "you."

Third-person point of view is when the narrator is not a character in the story, but rather describes the lives and thoughts of all of the other characters from an outside perspective.

Tip #3: Think about why Nick is the narrator and not Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby is written from the perspective of Nick Carraway. The story would be very different if it was told from Gatsby's perspective. Instead, Nick guesses at the life and thoughts of Gatsby, making Gatsby seem more mysterious and larger-than-life than he would be if the reader knew all of his thoughts.

Tip #4: Analyze why the story is written in first-person.

The story would also be very different if it was told in the third-person point of view. A third-person point of view would give the reader a necessarily more honest description of events. Nick describes himself as honest, but how does the reader know that events took place exactly as Nick describes them? Is Nick an unreliable narrator?

Allegory in The Great Gatsby

Allegories are stories in which the characters and/or plot symbolize larger concepts. In The Great Gatsby, the larger concept I'll focus on is that of the American Dream. Other allegorical concepts you could address include commentary on the social class divide or the vapidity of high society.

Tip #5: Think about what this book says about society, specifically as it relates to the American Dream.

In the 1920s, the American Dream was the idea of going from rags to riches. However The Great Gatsby shows that this dream is unattainable.

Gatsby achieves the so-called American Dream by building his wealth over the years in whatever way he possibly could. He displays his wealth with lavish parties but never enjoys himself. He is unsatisfied with the shallowness of the upper class, and yearns for something more.

While Gatsby's rags to riches background is a literal interpretation of the American Dream, Daisy is a more symbolic interpretation. As mentioned above, she is described as a "golden girl," representing riches. Gatsby has always longed for her, but when he finally gets her to admit her feelings for him, he still isn't satisfied. He wants more-he wants her to say that she never loved Tom.

Fitzgerald uses Gatsby to show that the American Dream is unattainable-the dream can never become reality because the dreamer always wants more. Gatsby was not satisfied when he became wealthy or when he finally got Daisy because he still wanted something more.

Character Analyses in The Great Gatsby

There are plenty of characters you can analyze in The Great Gatsby -Nick, Daisy, Myrtle, Tom, or Gatsby himself. Each character has different qualities and characteristics, and they were all put into the story for a reason. It's your job to find out what that reason was.

Tip #6: Don't just describe characters, but write about what they represent.

Each character has certain personality traits that represent a facet of human nature. Daisy, for example, represents innocence, while her husband, Tom, represents the evil of what we would call the " one percent " today.

Each of these characters was created in the mind of the author not just to make a good story, but also to offer a glimpse into the human condition. Tap into the meanings behind the characters, and you'll have a pretty spectacular analysis.

Tip #7: Analyze the relationships between characters.

People don't live in a vacuum-they interact with and react to other people around them. And the characters of The Great Gatsby are no different. You could analyze the nostalgic love between Daisy and Gatsby, the rocky relationship between Daisy and Tom, and the adoring (and sometimes contemptuous) relationship between Nick and Gatsby.

Focusing on the relationships between the characters makes for a great literary analysis because characters are essential to a great piece of literature. Therefore, understanding them and their relationships is also important.

Tone in The Great Gatsby

The tone of a story is how the author or narrator describes the events and other characters. It can be cynical, witty, bright, optimistic, pessimistic, or something else.

Many words you would use to describe a person's personality can also be used to describe the tone of a story.

Tip #8: Analyze the tone of the novel.

First, decide what the tone of the novel is. Then write about how the tone affects the readers' perceptions of events and characters.

Some readers describe the tone of The Great Gatsby as cynical, some say it's judgmental -but you can decide on your own how you might describe the tone of the story. More important than the exact wording of how you describe the tone is how the tone affects the reader's perception of what's going on.

Because The Great Gatsby is told in the first person, there is some bias in what the narrator describes. We are presented with Nick's feelings and perspective as if it's the truth without any way of getting a different perspective.

Therefore, Nick's tone as a narrator portrays his overall feelings about the people and events he describes and changes the way the reader experiences them.

Final Thoughts on Your Analysis of The Great Gatsby

Symbolism, allegory, point of view, character, and tone are not even half of the types of analyses you could do, but hopefully they're enough to get you started. Check out this site for a comprehensive list of literary devices that you could analyze.

Need more help? Look at these example essays on the The Great Gatsby to see how other students have tackled their analyses.

If you're afraid your literary analysis still doesn't go deep enough, or if you just need a second pair of eyes (not Dr. Eckleburg's), send your analysis to one of the Kibin editors. They'll be able to make your essay shine.

Happy writing, old sport.

Psst... 98% of Kibin users report better grades! Get inspiration from over 500,000 example essays.

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The Great Gatsby: 8 Tips for a Literary Analysis - Kibin Blog

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The words "literary analysis" drop from your instructor's mouth, and you freeze in terror. The Great Gatsby is one of those books that resonates throughout the ages-that's why you're reading it and writing about it for your class-but you certainly don't feel comfortable enough with the novel to write a literary analysis .

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u.s. history reading guide to the great gatsby

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U.S. History Reading Guide to The Great Gatsby

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The resources here will help understand the historical context of each chapter of the novel The Great Gatsby.

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69. 5 interesting facts about The Great Gatsby

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69. 5 interesting facts about The Great Gatsby

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1. The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in Fitzgerald's lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies. Fitzgerald's third novel, The Great Gatsbywas first published in 1925. It is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and WWI veteran who goes to live on Long Island, next door to Jay Gatsby, a rich tycoon known for throwing parties. The novel's evocation of 1920s America and its critique of the American Dream has helped to ensure its place among the great American novels, but it was outsold at the time by This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel, published in 1920.

2. Fitzgerald toyed with many alternative titles before settling on The Great Gatsby - and even this he did only reluctantly. Fitzgerald considered calling he novel Gatsby, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Trimalchio in West Egg (an allusion to a character from the satirical Roman work by Petronius, the Satyricon), The High-Bouncing Lover,and the title Fitzgerald chose at the last minute - which was, of course, er ... Under the Red, White and Blue. (Fittingly, this nod to the 'Star-Spangled Banner', the American national anthem, points up an interesting link: Fitzgerald had been named Francis Scott Fitzgerald after his ancestor, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to the patriotic song.) So, we could easily have been writing a post celebrating a great American novel called Under the Red, White and Blue - were it not that Fitzgerald requested the change of title too late, so the former title stuck.

3. The Great Gatsby was first filmed in 1926, just one year after the novel was published. This was in the pre-talkies age of cinema, and the film was a silent movie adaptation of the stage version. Only a minute of footage survives.

4. The actress Sigourney Weaver took her 'stage' name from Sigourney Howard, a minor character mentioned in The Great Gatsby. But what is also worth noting is the fact that the character's name, 'Mrs Sigourney Howard', actually refers to the husband, so Sigourney is a male given name in the novel.

5. Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of just 44, four days before Christmas. At his funeral service, the American wit Dorothy Parker is supposed to have murmured, 'the poor son-of-a-bitch' (a quotation from The Great Gatsby). It is now believed that Fitzgerald suffered from a form of tuberculosis, although this was thought at one stage to have been a cover for his heavy drinking during the 1920s. However, he died not from TB but of a heart attack - he had suffered two attacks earlier in his life, but this third was to kill him. Fellow American novelist Nathanael West died in a car accident on his way to Fitzgerald's funeral.

There are numerous cheap editions of the novel available, of which The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth Classics)
is the best.

Related fun: the best Ernest Hemingway facts and some cool John Steinbeck facts. The Great Gatsby also features in Andrew Dix's pick of some of the most interesting film adaptations of American novels.
Image: F. Scott Fitzgerald by Carl van Vechten, 1937; Wikimedia Commons.

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Five Fascinating Facts about The Great Gatsby

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Fun facts about The Great Gatsby and its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1. The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in Fitzgerald's lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies. Fitzgerald's third novel, The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925.

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68. Excellent website (for your revisions and research)

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68. Excellent website (for your revisions and research)

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67. The Great Gastby   Basic Overview & Introduction
  

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67. The Great Gastby   Basic Overview & Introduction
  

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The Great Gastby   Basic Overview & Intro

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66. The 1920s and Context for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  

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66. The 1920s and Context for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  

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The 1920s and Context for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Uploaded by RTHS English with Ms. Brown on 2015-02-23.

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The Great Gatsby Chapter 4 Overview & Analysis

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Uploaded by RTHS English with Ms. Brown on 2015-03-02.

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62. Who is the real Great Gatsby (Chapter 6)

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62. Who is the real Great Gatsby (Chapter 6)

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Who Is the Real Gatsby   Chapter 6 Overview 1

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Uploaded by RTHS English with Ms. Brown on 2015-03-10.

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Uploaded by RTHS English with Ms. Brown on 2015-03-11.

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11th grade American OIB students. Lycée International Nelson Mandela.

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This treasure hunt was originally authored by Valerie Arbizu, with some alterations and updated links.

Follow the directions given for each section. Answer thoroughly on in a shared Google Doc that resides in one group member's folder or on your own paper. Do not "cut and paste. Rephrase the answers in your own words.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Skim the biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. What intrigues you about Fitzgerald's life and writing? Note: Do not simply copy out the first sentence. Skim the entire biography and be sure you are thinking about this question.

2. World War I

After the war ended, the economy skyrocketed, making it possible for people to spend more time and money on leisure activities. Review the website in this section. What are three major innovations that came out of the WWI experience?

After the War: What are the dominant postwar American attitudes and the major movements of the 1920's? Pay close attention to the attitudes of the "Lost Generation" and the "Prosperity & Consumerism" movement.

3. 19th Amendment

4. The Roaring Twenties
List three major events that occurred in 1922 (the year in which the novel is set). Note: You will want to skim this list and look for events that would have been important in America.

5. 18th Amendment

6. Prohibition

What is a Speakeasy? Based on information you have already collected from previous questions, why do you think Speakeasies popped up across the country?

Wikipedia: Speakeasy

Speakeasy photos

7. Organized Crime and Arnold Rothstein

8. Did your impression of Rothstein change from one web page to the next? Explain.

9. Flappers

Read the first five paragraphs of the article about "Flapper Jane." According to the author, what are the essential elements of being a true flapper?

After reading the article, look at the selected photos of Louise Brooks. Does she fit the "Flapper" profile as proposed by the author of "Flapper Jane"? Why or why not?

Read Dorothy Parker's poem "The Flapper." How does Ms. Parker feel about Flappers? Explain.

10. Automobiles

Why were cars considered "the most important catalyst for social change in the 1920's"?

The Rise of Automobiles

Photos of 1920's era automobiles.

Gatsby Coachworks: Reproductions of 1920's era automobiles. The white and gold car is similar to what Jay Gatsby would have driven.

11. Music

Listen to the music on the Spotify music player to the right (click on the track with your mouse). You may need to download or log in to Spotify. If the embedded playlist doesn't work, try this direct link to the playlist.

As you listen, record your thoughts and reactions to the songs.

12. 1920's Slang

Read some 1920's slang terms.

Select your five favorite slang words and copy them down.

Why did you choose these terms?

13. Video

View these video trailers for Great Gatsby movies.

What do you expect based on the scenes in the trailers?

14. Drawing Conclusions
Based on the information you have collected from this website, what do you think the plot and setting of The Great Gatsby will include? What kinds of characters do you expect to encounter in the novel?

Updated March 26, 2017

Home | Gatsby Main

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This treasure hunt was originally authored by Valerie Arbizu, with some alterations and updated links. Follow the directions given for each section. Answer thoroughly on in a shared Google Doc that resides in one group member's folder or on your own paper. Do not "cut and paste.

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Overview

The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past. Though The Great Gatsby runs to fewer than two hundred pages, there is no bigger read in American literature.

Introduction to the Book

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story, a mystery, and a social commentary on American life. Although it was not a commercial success for Fitzgerald during his lifetime, this lyrical novel has become an acclaimed masterpiece read and taught throughout the world.

Unfolding in nine concise chapters, The Great Gatsby concerns the wasteful lives of four wealthy characters as observed by their acquaintance, narrator Nick Carraway. Like Fitzgerald himself, Nick is from Minnesota, attended an Ivy League university, served in the U.S. Army during World War I, moved to New York after the war, and questions-even while participating in-high society.

Having left the Midwest to work in the bond business in the summer of 1922, Nick settles in West Egg, Long Island, among the nouveau riche epitomized by his next-door neighbor Jay Gatsby. A mysterious man of thirty, Gatsby is the subject of endless fascination to the guests at his lavish all-night parties. He is rumored to be a hero of the Great War. Others say he served as a German spy. Gatsby claims to have attended Oxford University, but the evidence is suspect. As Nick learns more about Gatsby, every detail about him seems questionable, except his love for the charming Daisy Buchanan.

Jay Gatsby's decadent parties are thrown with one goal: to attract Daisy, who lives across the bay in the more fashionable East Egg. From the lawn of his sprawling mansion, Gatsby can see the green light glowing on her dock, which becomes a symbol in the novel of an unreachable treasure, the "future that year by year recedes before us."

Though Daisy is a married socialite and a mother, Gatsby still worships her as his "golden girl." They first met when she was a young lady from an affluent family and he was a working-class military officer. Daisy pledged to wait for his return from the war. Instead she married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy classmate of Nick's. Having obtained a great fortune, Gatsby sets out to win her back again.

A profound indictment of class privilege in the Jazz Age and beyond, The Great Gatsby explores the conflict between decency and self-indulgence. In the novel's conclusion, the characters collide, leaving human wreckage in their wake.

"At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
- from The Great Gatsby

Major Characters in the Book

Nick Carraway
Nick, a young Midwesterner educated at Yale, is the novel's narrator. When he moves to the West Egg area of Long Island, he joins the lavish social world of Tom, Jordan, Gatsby, and his cousin Daisy.

Jay Gatsby
The handsome, mysterious Gatsby, who lives in a mansion next door to Nick's cottage, is known for his lavish parties. Nick, whom he trusts, gradually learns about Gatsby's past and his love for Daisy.

Daisy Buchanan
Beautiful, charming, and spoiled, Daisy is the object of Gatsby's love. Her caprice and materialism lead her to marry Tom Buchanan.

Tom Buchanan
From an enormously wealthy Chicago family, Tom is a former Yale football star who sees himself at the top of an exclusive social hierarchy. He is conceited, violent, racist, and unfaithful.

Jordan Baker
Daisy's friend Jordan epitomizes the modern woman of the 1920s. A liberated, competitive golfer, she is firmly established in high society. She both attracts and repels Nick as a romantic interest.

George Wilson
The owner of an auto garage at the edge of the valley of ashes, George finds his only happiness through his faithless wife, Myrtle.

Myrtle Wilson
Myrtle dreams of belonging to a higher social class than George can offer. Vivacious and sensual, she hopes her adulterous affair will lead to a life of glamour.

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Overview The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal.

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University Library | University of Adelaide

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Current: eBooks@Adelaide has now officially closed

We are very grateful to you all for your patronage and support over the years.

The University of Adelaide Library is proud to have contributed to the early movement of free eBooks and to have witnessed their popularity as they grew to become a regular fixture in study, research, and leisure.

There are a number of reputable alternatives for free access to material within the public domain:

Project Gutenberg

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eBooks@Adelaide has now officially closed

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We are very grateful to you all for your patronage and support over the years.

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The nation's first free public lending library opened in Massachusetts in 1790 with a collection of books donated by Benjamin Franklin, and public librarians have been helping Americans figure stuff out ever since. Sure, librarians excel at matching the right novel or biography or picture book to the right reader, but their mission is broader, and rooted in a radical idea: Everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, financial status, or any other factor, has a right to information. In honor of National Library Week, Mental Floss spoke to five public librarians to find out what they do behind the stacks to keep these local repositories of knowledge thriving.

1. THEY NEED TO HAVE AT LEAST A MASTER'S DEGREE TO GET A JOB.

In order to score a job, librarians need a master's degree in library science, library and information studies, or librarianship- programs in which they learn about cataloguing and organizing, statistics, research, management, and digital reference, among other essential skills. A librarian-in-training may also pick a specialty, like archival studies or rare books. Some librarians go on to earn a doctorate in library science; this degree can open the door to jobs in places like the Library of Congress and corporate research libraries.

2. THEY'RE INCREASINGLY IN DEMAND.

Librarians earn a median annual income of $60,760-about $10,000 higher than the average for all occupations nationwide. And in case you're thinking it's a dying industry, the Bureau of Labor statistics estimates that librarian jobs of all kinds-not just those in public libraries-will increase by 9 percent by 2026. In fact, a 2017 report by the education and publishing company Pearson found that librarians, curators, and archivists were among the occupational groups with the highest probability of increased demand by 2030 [ PDF].

3. THEY CAN HELP YOU WITH EVERYTHING FROM METADATA TO FILLING OUT YOUR TAXES.

Librarians are trained in accessing all sorts of information, not just what you find between two covers. Some of them, like Erica Findley, who works at the Multnomah County Library system in Portland, Oregon, specialize in metadata, which she describes as a fancy word for "how you describe a thing" (technically, it's data about other data). She focuses on making online catalogs easier for patrons to search: "We try to put ourselves in a user's shoes-what kind of key word are you going to type into the search box?"

Her colleague Katy Ferris specializes in electronic content, and says it's her mission to encourage patrons to "think beyond the library as a physical space where they can get the latest bestseller." That means assembling electronic resources-e-books and audio books, digitized objects like photos and pamphlets, streaming media, and online databases.

Not sure how to tell fake news from real news? Ask a librarian. They can also help you research how to fill out tax forms, get career training, find an AA meeting, and apply for citizenship. "People think, 'Librarians know everything!'" says Michelle Krakowski, an adult library specialist in Contra Costa County, California. "No, but we know where to look for it."

4. THERE'S PLENTY OF RESEARCH BEHIND THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS.

What does a librarian want most? "To give someone the perfect book," says Gia Paolini, a Contra Costa County community library manager. That said, no one, or 10, or 100 librarians can read every book published in a year. So, they do their own research in blogs and trade publications like Publishers Weekly, attend training sessions and webinars, and consult librarians-only subscription databases like NoveList.com, which offers book recommendations by librarians, for librarians. Rakisha Kearns-White, a young adult specialist at a large library in New York City, says she belongs to a committee whose members read several books every school semester, then present talks on them to their peers. Still, they read a lot-Kearns-White says "some colleagues read 1000 books a year, which is amazing. I don't know how they do that."

5. THEY LOVE HELPING TO SETTLE A BET.

There's a mundane occurrence to delight every librarian. "Especially if there are language barriers, I love when someone musters the courage to ask me a question and we can go back and forth to make sure I connect them to the right resources," Krakowski says. For Paolini, it's when "someone comes in nervous, expecting us to be mean, then they tell me, 'You guys are so nice ... and I didn't know you had e-books!"

But Paolini's favorite thing of all is getting a call at the phone reference desk from a sports bar where two buddies are arguing over player stats: "I'm like, 'This is great that you're calling the library to settle a bet!'"

6. THEIR JOBS ARE OFTEN DEPENDENT ON TAXES.

Funding for public libraries is complex and varies place by place, but the bulk often comes from city or county allocations or property taxes, supplemented with state or federal dollars, as well as private donations. The nature of these sources can make them inconsistent from year to year, which means librarians' jobs are often subject to uncertainty. Paolini says the economic crash of 2008 was "awful." She explains, "We're funded mostly by taxes, so when home values completely crashed we were looking at layoffs and [shortening] the hours we were open."

Sometimes libraries have to get creative to fill budget shortfalls: The Carnegie Library in Pennsylvania raised money to fill some of a $5.5 million funding gap in 2010 by selling seasonal ornaments, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other libraries have been forced to get similarly inventive by hosting fun runs, wine tastings, mini-golf, and even Scrabble tournaments at the library.

The good news, though, according to Paolini, is that despite the occasional politician who thinks libraries waste public money and should be abolished, "99 percent of people [seem to] love libraries and are happy to fund them. We're not going anywhere."

7. PLEASE DON'T ASK THEM FOR "BOY BOOKS."

Every librarian has their own set of pet peeves (not reading the posted hours, leaving books randomly in the stacks), but Kearns-White says that one of hers is when people come in and ask for "boy books" or "girl books." Her response: "Our books have no gender-I can recommend a good story about XYZ." Asking for books by gender, she says, "perpetuates unnecessary gender stereotypes and also perpetuates the idea that boys don't like to read books written by women or starring women, and it's really not true."

Another pet peeve? Parents who think their kids are reading the "wrong" kinds of books-comic books, say, instead of Shakespeare. In that case, Kearns-White will go above and beyond to get kids the books they want. "I'll take the kid into a section where the [parent] can't hear and say, 'Listen, I can see you don't like fiction but your mom isn't going to get off my back about it. I'll grab a book that seems like it could be remotely interesting to you, while you go get the book you really want. I'll convince your mom to let you get both.'"

8. LIBRARIAN STEREOTYPES FROM POP CULTURE MAKE THEM ROLL THEIR EYES.

Negative images of librarians abound in pop culture-most recently, in the Netflix series Stranger Things. "The librarian [in one episode] is like, 'You can't have any more books because you've already got three out,' and she's so nasty about it," Paolini says. "Every single librarian I know would say, 'I'll make you a deal.'"

The portrayal of librarians as dowdy spinsters gets another eye-roll, as does a messy library. "The library in No Man of Her Own (1932) with Carole Lombard looks like an apocalyptic nightmare. No librarian would ever let that happen," Paolini says.

9. THEY WISH YOU WOULDN'T USE BACON AS A BOOKMARK ...

Librarians find all kinds of objects wedged between the pages of books-$100 bills, Broadway tickets, condoms, paychecks, love letters, drugs, hatchets, knives, and even a vial labeled "smallpox sample." Messiest of all, though, might be the food left in books, like crumbled Cheetos, slices of pickles, and whole strips of bacon (both cooked and raw).

10. ... OR LEAVE WEIRD THINGS IN THE BOOK DROP.

People also love to stuff strange items in the book drop, whether it's a dozen doughnuts-how thoughtful?-or a live raccoon. Librarians have also found fireworks, eggs, and dead rabbits and fish, both of which required carefully cleaning the book drop as well as the books that had been inside. Dewey Readmore Books, a library cat from Iowa, was originally deposited as a kitten in the night drop box, then became an international celebrity.

11. THEY NEVER TALK TO MANY OF THEIR PATRONS ...

Between online catalogs, self-serve check-out stations, and e-books and audiobooks that are accessed with the OverDrive app from home, "We never even interact with most of our users," Ferris says. The surge in online usage doesn't mean actual books and periodicals have become irrelevant, though; they're just as in-demand as they ever were. "As librarians, it's important for us not to dictate what libraries should be," Krakowski says. Online services "help us support the diverse needs of our communities."

12. ... BUT IF YOU'RE WEIRD, THEY MIGHT GIVE YOU A NICKNAME.

Librarians meet plenty of characters. Brooke McCarley documented her (brief) interlude working in a library for ThoughtCatlog.com; among her most memorable patrons was a man who gifted her a bag of used teddy bears "in case I could use them." Reddit's libraries subreddit is also filled with librarians sharing stories about visitors bringing in kittens, reciting erotic poetry, showing up with cotton balls in their ears and noses-and smelling of everything from urine to gasoline. If you're particularly memorable, staff might make up a special name for you-according to redditor Greenjourney, one character at a small rural library has been nicknamed "Prince Valiant" by the staff for his bowl-shaped haircut and "medieval bathing habits."

13. THEIR JOB CAN COME WITH UNEXPECTED HAZARDS.

Librarians get yelled at, hit on, and insulted. "Sitting out there at a desk opens you up to all kids of micro-aggressions," Kearns-White explains. But even on an average day, programs can go a little ... sideways. "I remember holding up a big tarantula and all the kids screaming," Paolini says about her years running programs as a children's librarian. "We also lost a boa constrictor once."

Most public libraries have a code of conduct in place so librarians can eject anyone who's intoxicated or acting abusively. These behaviors can lead to suspensions, although, Paolini says, "Most of us look at being in this space as a human right. You'd have to be an incredibly bad person-tried to hurt children or something-to get banned for life."

14. SOMETIMES PATRONS JUST WANT TO TALK.

Some patrons need validation for their parenting skills, or a sympathetic ear to complain to. "Since public libraries are one of the few spaces you can go where nothing is asked of you, you get a lot of folks in crisis looking for help," Ferris explains.

Other resources librarians may provide, depending on the needs and desires of their patrons: summer lunch programs for low-income kids; maker spaces; musical events; and access to on-site social workers.

15. THEIR GOAL IS TO MAKE LIFELONG LEARNERS-OF PATRONS, AND THEMSELVES.

Between 1883 and 1929, steel mogul Andrew Carnegie funded thousands of public libraries around the world-including 1795 in the U.S. "The history of the Carnegie free libraries is still with us," Krakowski says. "This is one of the few places in the world where you can walk in and go through the stacks, and there's no gatekeeper."

It's just this freedom and openness that attracts so many librarians to their profession. "We love information, and most of us are lifelong learners," Krakowski continues. "What I love most is when people ask me questions from a different sort of life context [or background]. I'm excited to say, 'I never thought about that! Let's find out together.'"

16. SOMETIMES THEY NEED TO WEAR COSTUMES.

A large part of a librarian's job is to get libraries recognized as community resources. For Krakowski, that means forging connections with organizations involved in animal services or workforce development, for example. "They may have experts who provide specialized services to the community, and we can support them by bringing certain [tools] into the library," she says. For job development, that might mean things like training seminars, books about how to make a career change, and linking to national databases of jobs, like the U.S. Department of Labor's CareerOneStop.com

Children's librarians also get requests to read at daycare centers and schools-and often, to dress up like characters such as Pete the Cat or one of the Wild Things. "Sometimes you think, 'I didn't go to library school for this,'" Paolini says. But that kind of outreach gives librarians the opportunity to introduce the library to new readers, promote summer reading programs, and get kids to sign up for their own library cards.

17. THEY HAVE A CODE OF ETHICS.

In 1939, the American Library Association, the leadership body for professional librarians, adopted a 28-point Code of Ethics, which has been foundational to the mission of librarians ever since. It's been amended three times since it was first adopted, and cut from 28 points to 8, but its basic tenets remain the same-serving as a mission statement of "general ambition" in dealing with censorship, privacy, and how a librarian should juggle her private views when they differ from those of her employing institution. Privacy especially, Krakowski says, is "an important thing to think about now, with discussions about the privacy of information and user data. Librarians are at the forefront of this, and understanding what privacy is, since we see people as individuals-not data sets."

The Code of Ethics are just guidelines, however-they're not legally binding, so violating them won't get a librarian fired.

18. THEY MIGHT HIDE THE OFFICE SUPPLIES.

Most librarians are highly educated professionals who take their job very seriously. That said, they're humans, too, and the Tumblr Librarian Shaming collects some anonymous confessions from librarians who have behaved less-than-perfectly. That might mean getting garlic butter on the books, refusing to check out DVDs that are hard to find, transferring phone calls from abusive patrons to other libraries, or hiding the tape dispensers ("because people think that using 'a little bit of tape' means taking about a foot").

19. THEY DON'T WANT YOUR OLD MAGAZINES.

"We love to talk to you and answer your questions, so please interrupt us, and don't think of us as scary," Krakowski says. "You are our first priority, and libraries would not exist if not for you!"

There is one notable exception to this rule, however. "Please do not ask us if we want your moldy, outdated set of Encyclopedia Britannicas, or your mother's collection of Better Homes and Gardens," Paolini notes. The answer to that question will always be a resounding "No!"

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The nation's first free public lending library opened in Massachusetts in 1790 with a collection of books donated by Benjamin Franklin, and public librarians have been helping Americans figure stuff out ever since.

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John Green

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The Roaring 20's: Crash Course US History #32

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53. Ted Ed lesson: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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53. Ted Ed lesson: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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The Great Gatsby: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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52. Booming economy and consumerism (part 1) // Poverty (part 2)

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52. Booming economy and consumerism (part 1) // Poverty (part 2)

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A 'how far' question ALWAYS indicates that there are two sides to the argument. So, on the one hand you can cite evidence of burgeoning prosperity - on the other hand there is evidence that there were many who did not share in the prosperity .]

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More than any other illustrator, John Held Jr.'s comic art captured the style and exuberant tenor of the "Decade that Roared."

The battle for suffrage was finally over. After a 72-year struggle, women had won the precious right to vote. The generations of suffragists that had fought for so long proudly entered the political world. Carrie Chapman Catt carried the struggle into voting awareness with the founding of the League of Women Voters. Alice Paul vowed to fight until an Equal Rights Amendment was added to the Constitution. Margaret Sanger declared that female independence could be accomplished only with proper birth control methods. To their dismay, the daughters of this generation seemed uninterested in these grand causes. As the 1920s roared along, many young women of the age wanted to have fun.

Life of the Flappers

Flappers were northern, urban, single, young, middle-class women. Many held steady jobs in the changing American economy. The clerking jobs that blossomed in the Gilded Age were more numerous than ever. Increasing phone usage required more and more operators. The consumer-oriented economy of the 1920s saw a burgeoning number of department stores. Women were needed on the sales floor to relate to the most precious customers - other women. But the flapper was not all work and no play.

By night, flappers engaged in the active city nightlife. They frequented jazz clubs and vaudeville shows. Speakeasies were a common destination, as the new woman of the twenties adopted the same carefree attitude toward prohibition as her male counterpart. Ironically, more young women consumed alcohol in the decade it was illegal than ever before. Smoking, another activity previously reserved for men, became popular among flappers. With the political field leveled by the Nineteenth Amendment, women sought to eliminate social double standards. Consequently, the flapper was less hesitant to experiment sexually than previous generations. Sigmund Freud's declaration that the libido was one of the most natural of human needs seemed to give the green light to explore.

The Flapper Look

The flapper had an unmistakable look. The long locks of Victorian women lay on the floors of beauty parlors as young women cut their hair to shoulder length. Hemlines of dresses rose dramatically to the knee. The cosmetics industry flowered as women used make-up in large numbers. Flappers bound their chests and wore high heels. Clara Bow, Hollywood's "It" Girl, captured the flapper image for the nation to see.

Many women celebrated the age of the flapper as a female declaration of independence. Experimentation with new looks, jobs, and lifestyles seemed liberating compared with the socially silenced woman in the Victorian Age. The flappers chose activities to please themselves, not a father or husband. But critics were quick to elucidate the shortcomings of flapperism. The political agenda embraced by the previous generation was largely ignored until the feminist revival of the 1960s. Many wondered if flappers were expressing themselves or acting like men. Smoking, drinking, and sexual experimentation were characteristic of the modern young woman. Short hair and bound chests added to the effect. One thing was certain: Despite the potential political and social gains or losses, the flappers of the 1920s sure managed to have a good time.

John Held, Jr.
Check out this biographical sketch of John Held, Jr., the young artist of the 1920s whose style defined the "Roaring Twenties" and immortalized the flapper look. Lots of illustrations, of course.

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Women wearing makeup and not wearing stockings? The flappers' dress revolution was more shocking in its day than the bra-burning of the 1960's!
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49. Context of composition -- Prohibition

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49. Context of composition -- Prohibition

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The Fight Against "Demon Rum" [ushistory.org]

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The passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919 ushered in the era of Prohibition. While overall consumption of alcohol and the incidence of alcohol-related diseases declined considerably, Prohibition brought with it the rise of organized crime, which arose to meet public demand for the forbidden "Demon Rum"

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48. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist

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48. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist

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Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist | Whitney Museum of American Art

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Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891-1981) was a bold and highly original modernist and one of the great visual chroniclers of twentieth-century American life. He first came to prominence in the 1920s during the early days of the Harlem Renaissance-the cultural flowering of African American art, music, and literature that extended beyond the New York neighborhood of its name to other cities, notably Chicago, where Motley spent most of his life.

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Start studying Great Gatsby Quotations. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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The Great Gatsby - plot and themes Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying The Great Gatsby - plot and themes. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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Learn about the Roaring Twenties - a period of great change in both the US and Western Europe

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They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ... But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America would be called The Great Gatsby, and one anonymous reviewer spoke for most of its first readers in describing it as "one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced".

They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ... But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America would be called The Great Gatsby, and one anonymous reviewer spoke for most of its first readers in describing it as "one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced".

The Great Gatsby would indeed create an aftermath of wonder - in ways that its initial audience could not have imagined. Almost 90 years later, Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annually sold millions of copies globally. This slim novel of fewer than 50,000 words, a story of secret visions and gaudy revels, of sudden violence and constant envy, shimmers with a magic that readers have long recognised. But over the past two years, both The Great Gatsby and its author have been seeing a marked resurgence of interest. In the last 12 months in Britain alone, there have been stage versions at Wilton's Music Hall and the King's Head theatre in London, the eight-hour reading, Gatz, was staged by the American Elevator Repair Company last year to rave reviews, and the Northern Ballet's dance adaptation will open soon at Sadler's Wells. Some of Fitzgerald's long-overlooked poems, letters and stories are suddenly being published and are circulating online. Several new books are in the works, one about The Great Gatsby's enduring appeal, and two about Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood, while my own book, which traces the genesis of The Great Gatsby, is about to be published. Gatsby has been thoroughly inspected and crawled over, lifted up and shaken out for every last detail it can surrender to its fascinated readers, but this remarkable novel has some surprises left.

Meanwhile Scott's wife, Zelda, often called the original flapper, has been enjoying her own renaissance, with a play last year at Trafalgar Studios about her life, and several books about her life coming out this year. When iconic figures re-emerge into the spotlight, you can bet that merchandising will soon follow: we are surrounded by haute couture and high street "Gatsby" dresses, speakeasies and prohibition cocktails, beads and headdresses, Gatsby clutches and iPhone covers, 1920s jazz standards and Charleston lessons.

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All this, and Baz Luhrmann, too: Luhrmann's new film version of The Great Gatsby, which will open the Cannes film festival before Charlestoning its way around the world, is released this month. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the hopeful hero with a shady past, and Carey Mulligan is Daisy, the shallow woman he adores. Joel Edgerton is very well cast as Daisy's husband, the bullying Tom Buchanan, while Tobey Maguire must create a character from the voice of the elusive, self-effacing Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator, which is probably the trickiest aspect of dramatising The Great Gatsby, harder even than bringing the magnetic, paradoxical, chimerical Jay Gatsby to life.

Gatsby has been filmed four times to date, but it has been nearly 40 years since the last big-screen adaptation, Jack Clayton's 1974 version, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. It was the first version to be filmed in colour. Luhrmann's taste for extravaganza seems to most people to suit Gatsby perfectly, although it is in fact a far more tightly controlled novel than it seems, and Luhrmann is not known for his restraint.

Previews suggest a film of decadent, epicurean extravagance and debauchery. Its reputation for revelries aside, Fitzgerald's novel in fact features just three parties, and only one of these offers paeans to its own splendours. The first party is the sordid little gathering in the flat of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's mistress, when Tom breaks Myrtle's nose for merely mentioning his wife Daisy's name. The third and final party is at Gatsby's mansion, but Fitzgerald uses it to shift the story's mood definitively from enchantment to disenchantment: Daisy and Tom attend, and their contempt for Gatsby's world exposes its tawdriness, its tinsel wrappings. Only the second party, with Nick as lyrical witness to its glories, features the magical prose that lingers in readers' minds - the girls floating among the whisperings and the moths and the champagne, yellow cocktail music rising over the blue gardens, the opera of voices pitching a key higher - and even that party has little of the saturnalia that seems to characterise Luhrmann's vision.

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Although colour is central to the novel, the first surviving film version is a black-and-white noir thriller from 1949 starring Alan Ladd. In true Hollywood mid-century style, the film grows deeply uncomfortable with the reprehensible behaviour of its characters and forces them all to repent at story's end; the final moments of the film bring a cascade of changes of heart. Even Tom feels contrite and tries to save Gatsby, while Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech about saving young men like him from older men like him ("What's going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don't tell them we're wrong?"). Twenty years before the noir Gatsby was the first cinematic version, a silent film from 1926 that has been lost, although the academic Anne Margaret Daniel recently revealed in the Huffington Post that a letter in the Fitzgerald archives shows that Scott and Zelda attended a screening of the film in 1927: Zelda wrote to their daughter that it was "ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left."

Whether Fitzgerald would have enjoyed any of the subsequent stage and film versions any better is open to some question. Gatsby is about the superiority of imagination over reality, which makes it very difficult to dramatise well. It is a novel of layered projections: Gatsby projects his fantasies on to Daisy, and we can't be certain whether Nick is projecting his fantasies on to Gatsby, or is instead the only person to see past Gatsby's facade to the grandeur of the real man.

Among the dismissive early reviews of the novel was one by the influential critic HL Mencken, who called Gatsby little more than "a glorified anecdote". Understandably frustrated at the general failure of critical acumen all around him, Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson: "Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A. and Class C., if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazov ... Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." He might well have said the same thing about the dramatic versions to come, which some of us would argue move ever further away from what the novel is about, and toward our myths about it. But, beyond question, Fitzgerald would have been delighted at the adulation his masterpiece has long inspired.

When he composed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was one of the most successful writers of his era, among the decade's highest-paid writers of magazine fiction. He had been young, brash, ambitious; when he became his own success story he won Alabama belle Zelda Sayre and the pair rapidly became legendary for their revels, incarnating the "flappers and philosophers" who populated the jazz age - the name Fitzgerald himself bestowed upon the era he and Zelda still embody.

But Fitzgerald also had serious artistic ambitions, and when he began The Great Gatsby he set out to write "a consciously artistic achievement". "I want to write something new," he told his editor, Max Perkins, in the summer of 1922, "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple & intricately patterned"; later he added that his new novel must have "the very best I am capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I am capable of". From beginning to end this is a story about capability, about our reach exceeding our grasp.

What made Gatsby emphatically "new" was not its focus upon modern life, however: Fitzgerald had written of nothing else since the start of his career. Since the appearance of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, readers had been shocked at his revelations about the younger generation, the gin-swilling, party-hopping, table-dancing young men and women who shot craps and danced to the déclassé rhythms of jazz. And one of the reasons that most of its early readers couldn't see Gatsby's greatness was because it, too, seemed merely to report on their modern world.

What they couldn't yet appreciate was that this insider's guide to the enchantments of the jazz age was also an uncanny glimpse into the world to come. To take just one example, in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the most glamorous novels in history, which has itself become a kind of glittering celebrity novel. But it also demolishes the workings of celebrity, parsing the way that gossip becomes currency in the fame business, rumour a gauge of spurious greatness. Today, more often than not any artistic work itself is subordinated to the "vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" that is celebrity culture, but Gatsby's pleasures transcend the pleasure-seeking world that it indicted.

It was a world few understood better than the Fitzgeralds. When the 20s started to roar, Scott and Zelda grabbed a drink and jumped into the centre of the stage, where they stayed until 1930, when the centrifugal force of their lives suddenly sent them both reeling into extremity. Until then, the Fitzgeralds were the life and soul of the prohibition party, and he was its greatest chronicler.

"There seemed little doubt about what was going to happen," Fitzgerald wrote later. "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." By the early 1920s, he could already sense that "the whole golden boom was in the air - its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition". As the spree kicked off, Fitzgerald found that "a fresh picture of life in America began to form before my eyes". By 1924, he was painting an indelible picture of that new life, setting his new novel in 1922 (just after the "general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921"), in order to tell of "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure".

The party had begun, and all of America was invited. Wealth remained a social barrier, but it was no longer impenetrable. Speakeasies were breaking down old social barriers by creating spaces where the upper crust rubbed shoulders with the lower orders. At the same time, the new money from bootlegging and its related enterprises, and from an almost totally unregulated stock market, enabled the rapid rise of energetic men - and some women - prepared to break a law or two: and the riches to be gained soon enticed the well-educated into joining the fray. Corruption was rife, law-breaking suddenly a way of life. But even amid the boom, poverty lingered: in the underground economy of bootleggers, hustlers, gangsters, prostitutes, pimps and cocaine dealers, and in the legitimate service economy of chauffeurs and taxi drivers, bellboys and chambermaids, immigrants from Europe, or black migrant workers from the south, driven into the great migration north, and ending up in Harlem. Nightclubs sprang up where they played jazz and drank gin and danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

Fitzgerald understood early that the party couldn't last for ever. "It was borrowed time anyhow - the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls." Less than five years after Gatsby was published, the market would crash, and the Great Depression fell like a curtain over the festivities. Fitzgerald began to reflect on the age he had come to epitomise in a series of great essays - "My Lost City," "Echoes of the Jazz Age," "Early Success," and the largely forgotten "My Generation" - and stories, including the haunting "Babylon Revisited".

The jazz age may have ended, but the age of advertisement had begun, and in Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the earliest indictments of a nation in thrall to the false gods of the marketplace. Nearly a century later, his cautionary tale has returned to haunt us, warning again of the perils of boom and bust, holding a mirror up to our tarnished world. Fitzgerald's hero, the poor farm boy named Jimmy Gatz who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, who "sprang from a Platonic conception of himself", epitomises the self-made man. But Gatsby is also unmade by his faith in America's myths and lies: that meritocracy is real, that you can make yourself into whatever you want to be, that with money, anything is possible. (The historical irony is that Gatsby is destroyed because in his world money did not make everything possible - but in our world it increasingly does. Today the illusion of Jay Gatsby would not have shattered like glass against Tom Buchanan's "hard malice": Gatsby's money would have insulated him and guaranteed triumph - an outcome that Fitzgerald would have deplored more than anyone.) Attempting to pass himself off as a patrician, Gatsby tries too hard, his every gesture and word a dead giveaway to the people around him. Tom Buchanan doesn't believe that Gatsby went to Oxford because he wears a lurid pink suit. The marginal character Owl-Eyes, who has been drunk for a week, can see clearly that Gatsby is putting on a show. Gatsby is not merely a fake, he is an obvious fake.

But the novel works in the opposite direction. Its performance is almost perfect: an apparently insouciant ease belies the intensely clever, dynamic writing and carefully limited perspective. It is a novel of ellipses: to understand it well, we must learn to read between the lines, as Gatsby fails to do. The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald's language is extremely risky, always in danger of becoming as kitschy as Gatsby's pink suit. Once or twice Fitzgerald's command does slip: when he is reunited with Daisy, for example, Gatsby is delighted to discover "twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room", and when he falls in lovewith her he wants to "suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder". Sometimes even a classic falls short of our dreams - frankly, the less said about twinkle-bells of sunshine and breastfeeding wonder, the better. But for the most part Fitzgerald's prose is a kind of experiment in restrained extravagance.

Just as the style is nearly paradoxical in its ability to cut both ways, so are the novel's meanings. It is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life. As Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins wrote in 1925: it is "a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism". The hard facts of power and economics play out against the mythological promises of fantasy and ideology. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past. We find ourselves surveying the waste and wreckage after the party ends, but ready to carouse some more.

Gatsby is a fable about betrayal - of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won't simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived. By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone. But that doesn't stop him from chasing "the green light" of wealth and status, the dangled promise of power that can only create a corrupt plutocracy shored up by vast social inequality.

If that sounds familiar, it should: our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald's. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction," he insisted, adding later, "I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works". He wasn't in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. "Like so many Americans," Fitzgerald wrote in his 1927 story "Jacob's Ladder", "he valued things rather than cared about them."

The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win. As the eminent critic Lionel Trilling observed in 1951: "Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realised the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity." In fact, as a young man Fitzgerald described himself as a socialist, and in the 1930s, like almost all writers of his era, he became interested in communism (although he was soon unimpressed). And it is certainly true that if Fitzgerald was a socialist, he was the original champagne socialist.

He was so far ahead of his time that we are only just catching up with him. Fitzgerald even recognised our obsession with youth, writing in 1934 of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night: "she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth." And he understood early that Americans try to liberate themselves from history, to float free from it, because part of the so-called American dream, bound up with fantasies of starting over, is the escape from time and mutability into a purely sybaritic present.

Gatsby is destroyed by the founding American myth: that the marketplace can be a religion, that the material can ever be ideal. At the beginning of the novel Fitzgerald writes of Gatsby's capacity for hope; at the end he writes of man's capacity for wonder. And the distance that the novel traverses is the defeat of that capacity, its surrender to our capacity for cynicism. All that enchantment withers up and blows away, skittering with the leaves across Gatsby's dusty lawn.

In the unforgettable closing passage of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes it clear that if his story is about America, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration. Nick Carraway wanders to the shore at the edge of the continent and imagines Dutch sailors seeing America for the first time: "Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

The trees are long gone, replaced by vulgar mansions and the wasteland of ash heaps next to which poor George and Myrtle Wilson live, "contiguous to absolutely nothing". What is left is what was always there - the imagination. But even this Fitzgerald undercuts: pandering, after all, is ministering to mere gratification. The idea that America panders to our fantasies is the precise opposite of the American dream. We are forever chasing the green light, a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. And yet although it is a lie, we can't survive without it, for we always need something commensurate to our capacity for wonder, even if it compels us into a contemplation we neither understand nor desire.

And so we falter forward, lost in the aftermath of wonder that follows The Great Gatsby.

* Sarah Churchwell's Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby will be published by Virago on 6 June. The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann is released on 10 May
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They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ...

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In the New York Times earlier this year, Paul Krugman wrote of an economic effect called "The Great Gatsby curve," a graph that measures fiscal inequality against social mobility and shows that America's marked economic inequality means it has correlatively low social mobility. In one sense this hardly seems newsworthy, but it is telling that even economists think that F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece offers the most resonant (and economical) shorthand for the problems of social mobility, economic inequality and class antagonism that we face today. Nietzsche - whose Genealogy of Morals Fitzgerald greatly admired - called the transformation of class resentment into a moral system "ressentiment"; in America, it is increasingly called the failure of the American dream, a failure now mapped by the "Gatsby curve".

Fitzgerald had much to say about the failure of this dream, and the fraudulences that sustain it - but his insights are not all contained within the economical pages of his greatest novel. Indeed, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in April 1925, the phrase "American dream" as we know it did not exist. Many now assume the phrase stretches back to the nation's founding, but "the American dream" was never used to describe a shared national value system until a popular 1917 novel called Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, which remarked that "the fashion and home magazines ... have prepared thousands of Americans ... for the possible rise of fortune that is the universal American dream and hope." The OED lists this as the first recorded instance of the American dream, although it's not yet the catchphrase as we know it. That meaning is clearly emerging - but only as "possible" rise of fortune; a dream, not a promise. And as of 1917, at least some Americans were evidently beginning to recognise that consumerism and mass marketing were teaching them what to want, and that rises of fortune would be measured by the acquisition of status symbols. The phrase next appeared in print in a 1923 Vanity Fair article by Walter Lippmann, "Education and the White-Collar Class" (which Fitzgerald probably read); it warned that widening access to education was creating untenable economic pressure, as young people graduated with degrees only to find that insufficient white-collar jobs awaited. Instead of limiting access to education in order to keep such jobs the exclusive domain of the upper classes (a practice America had recently begun to justify by means of a controversial new idea called "intelligence tests"), Lippmann argued that Americans must decide that skilled labour was a proper vocation for educated people. There simply weren't enough white-collar jobs to go around, but "if education could be regarded not as a step ladder to a few special vocations, but as the key to the treasure house of life, we should not even have to consider the fatal proposal that higher education be confined to a small and selected class," a decision that would mark the "failure of the American dream" of universal education.

These two incipient instances of the phrase are both, in their different ways, uncannily prophetic; but as a catchphrase, the American dream did not explode into popular culture until the 1931 publication of a book called The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams, which spoke of "the American dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces that appear to be overwhelming it."

In the early years of the great depression Adams's book sparked a great national debate about the promise of America as a place that fosters "the genuine worth of each man or woman", whose efforts should be restricted by "no barriers beyond their own natures". Two years later, a New York Times article noted: "Get-rich-quick and gambling was the bane of our life before the smash"; they were also what caused the "smash" itself in 1929. By 1933, Adams was writing in the New York Times of the way the American dream had been hijacked: "Throughout our history, the pure gold of this vision has been heavily alloyed with the dross of materialistic aims. Not only did the wage scales and our standard of living seem to promise riches to the poor immigrant, but the extent and natural wealth of the continent awaiting exploitation offered to Americans of the older stocks such opportunities for rapid fortunes that the making of money and the enjoying of what money could buy too often became our ideal of a full and satisfying life. The struggle of each against all for the dazzling prizes destroyed in some measure both our private ideals and our sense of social obligation." As the Depression deepened, books such as Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence were arguing that "monopoly capitalism is morally ugly as well as economically unsound," that in America "the large majority should be able - in accordance with the tenets of the 'American dream' ... to count on living in an atmosphere of equality, in a world which puts relatively few barriers between man and man." Part of the problem, however, was that the dream itself was being destroyed by "the friends of big business, who dishonour the dream by saying that it has been realised" already.

The phrase the American dream was first invented, in other words, to describe a failure, not a promise: or rather, a broken promise, a dream that was continually faltering beneath the rampant monopoly capitalism that set each struggling against all; and it is no coincidence that it was first popularised during the early years of the great depression. The impending failure had been clear to Fitzgerald by the time he finished Gatsby - and the fact that in 1925 most Americans were still recklessly chasing the dream had a great deal to do with the initial commercial and critical failure of The Great Gatsby, which would not be hailed as a masterpiece until the 50s, once hindsight had revealed its prophetic truth.

On 19 October 1929, just five days before the first stock market crash and 10 days before Black Tuesday, Scott Fitzgerald published a now-forgotten story called "The Swimmers," about an American working for the ironically named Promissory Trust Bank, and his realisation that American ideals have been corrupted by money. This corruption is emblematised by sexual infidelity: as in Gatsby, Fitzgerald again used adultery to suggest a larger world of broken promises and betrayals of faith. There's a remarkable moment early in "The Swimmers" - which Fitzgerald called "the hardest story I ever wrote, too big for its space" - when an unfaithful wife, who is French, complains about the American women she sees on the Riviera:

"How would you place them?" she exclaimed. "Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses - they are all the same. Look! ..."

Suddenly she pointed to an American girl going into the water:

"That young lady may be a stenographer and yet be compelled to warp herself, dressing and acting as if she had all the money in the world."

"Perhaps she will have, some day."

"That's the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine. That's why all their faces over thirty are discontented and unhappy."

The American dream comes true for just 1%: for the other 99%, only discontent and bitterness await, ressentiment on a mass scale. More than 15 years later, the Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer used a similar image of the typist who believed she would be a movie star to reveal the American dream as a rigged lottery that no one wins but everyone plays. Today, almost 100 years after "The Swimmers" appeared, the Occupy movement has clenched its fist around the same angry realisation that we are all the 99%, not the 1%. More remarkable than the fact that Fitzgerald beat Adorno and Horkheimer and the Occupy movement to the punch, however, is that he saw all this before Wall Street came smashing down.

The villain of "The Swimmers" is a rich, vulgar banker who preaches an updated version of the gilded age's "gospel of wealth": "Money is power ... Money made this country, built its great and glorious cities, created its industries, covered it with an iron network of railroads." The banker is wrong, the story makes clear, but his vision of America is winning. Feeling increasingly alienated, the protagonist, Marston, finds himself musing on the meanings of America, and especially its eagerness to forget history: "Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were - perhaps money was a form of fin. In England property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition." The buoyancy of modern America depended on its being unanchored by history or tradition, and this is the America we have inherited. Historical amnesia is certainly liberating - so liberating that America is once again diving into free fall, unmoored by any critical or intellectual insight into its own myths, or even into the histories of the debates that we think define our moment.

Marston eventually decides that there is no place for him in the crass society symbolised by his rival, but he will not relinquish his faith in the ideals that America can represent. As Marston sails for Europe, watching America recede into his past, Fitzgerald offers a closing meditation nearly as incantatory as the famous conclusion of Gatsby: "Watching the fading city, the fading shore, from the deck of the Majestic, he had a sense of overwhelming gratitude and of gladness that America was there, that under the ugly débris of industry the rich land still pushed up, incorrigibly lavish and fertile, and that in the heart of the leaderless people the old generosities and devotions fought on, breaking out sometimes in fanaticism and excess, but indomitable and undefeated. There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of the war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever. The best of America was the best of the world ... France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."

Wall Street crashed 10 days later.

❦

Two years after The Great Gatsby appeared, a reporter was sent to interview the famous author. Meeting "the voice and embodiment of the jazz age, its product and its beneficiary, a popular novelist, a movie scenarist, a dweller in the gilded palaces", the reporter found instead, to his distinct hilarity, that Fitzgerald was "forecasting doom, death and damnation to his generation". "He sounded", said the reporter, like "an intellectual Sampson" predicting that the Plaza Hotel's marble columns would crumble. Fitzgerald's absurd prophecy was that America would face a great "national testing" in the very near future:

"The idea that we're the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination! ... The next fifteen years will show how much resistance there is in the American race."

"There has never been an American tragedy," Fitzgerald ended. "There have only been great failures."

It was 1927. The reporter was vastly amused.

* Sarah Churchwell's Careless People, on the origins of The Great Gatsby, will be published in 2013.
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In the New York Times earlier this year, Paul Krugman wrote of an economic effect called "The Great Gatsby curve," a graph that measures fiscal inequality against social mobility and shows that America's marked economic inequality means it has correlatively low social mobility.

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You can't open a newspaper these days without finding someone writing about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I'm not complaining. Gatsby is the novel - almost a prose poem - I reread every year, and I never tire of its backstory. Although everything I've seen about Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film fills me with anxiety, I'll be among the first to go and see it. Cinema and Fitzgerald could make an ideal marriage. Why shouldn't a movie director re-imagine 1920s West Egg and give us his reinterpretation of what Fitzgerald christened "The Jazz Age"? It can't, or won't, be the novel, but it might capture something of the madness in which Fitzgerald found himself.

The writer was great that way. A party animal with a line in champagne zingers; endlessly quotable; completely at one with the zeitgeist; a literary artist whose obiter dicta became the soundtrack of his times. For instance: "There are no second acts in American lives." And: "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." And perhaps most famous of all, the last line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

We're going to read a lot of Fitzgerald quotations these next few weeks. Fitzgerald's admirers will be delighted that he is getting some long overdue recognition, but sad, too, perhaps. When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

But perhaps Fitzgerald's life and work is compelling precisely because it answers, in an archetypal way, what we, the reading public, expect the career of a genius to look like. Consider the bare bones of his story. Comfortable beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, the heart of the midwest. His mother reports, appropriately, that the boy's first word was "up". First stirrings of the writer's ambition. He moves into the fast track of his society, pursuing literary goals, and goes to Princeton University. Drops out; falls in love and is rejected; writes a novel that's turned down; goes to the battlefields of France; returns to the USA with no prospects. Then ... 1919-1920: his annus mirabilis. Revises his unpublished work. This Side of Paradise is accepted by Scribner, and is published to huge acclaim. Now his sweetheart, Zelda Sayre, agrees to marriage.

Scott and Zelda lead rock star lives in the Manhattan of the 1920s. Burning with ambition for his art, Fitzgerald completes a book whose many rejected titles include Trimalchio in West Egg, the novel the world knows as The Great Gatsby. There's an added myth about its publication: Gatsby did not flop, as is often claimed; it just didn't do as well as had been hoped. TS Eliot, for one, wrote: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." It was only in comparison with Fitzgerald's astounding debut that it seemed to fail.

Thereafter, Fitzgerald went into a long tunnel of decline, a decade he later described in a controversial sequence of Esquire articles as "The Crack-Up", a rare text recently republished by Capuchin Classics. In search of that elusive "second act", he moved to Hollywood, published Tender Is the Night, a novel that baffled the critics, and began his final unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon. Then dies, aged 44; is forgotten, but lives on through Gatsby. It's a literary life for the ages.

In outline, the F Scott Fitzgerald story is the movie you might want to see. Baz Luhrmann's version will be entertaining. It won't be Gatsby, the novel. But never mind. Many new readers will be inspired to discover the miracle of Fitzgerald's prose, and the strange subtlety of his vision. In 1925, Gatsby was ahead of its time, and almost too prescient. Now, it seems perfectly in harmony with the deepest and darkest chords in American life. That's why, for some, including this writer, it remains the greatest American novel of the 20th century.
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Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater

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You can't open a newspaper these days without finding someone writing about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I'm not complaining. Gatsby is the novel - almost a prose poem - I reread every year, and I never tire of its backstory.

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Bill Nack reciting the closing lines of the novel

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Bill Nack: The closing lines of "The Great Gatsby"

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Fitzgerald's timeless prose is performed by the great American sportswriter. (Video by Roger Ebert)

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Represents the shallow quality of the characters' lives thus signifying the hollowness of the American Dream. The wealthy have everything but still not happy. However, cheating is not limited to solely the rich class, as it is present in all social classes. All the relationships in the novel contain a motive or purpose. For instance, Tom has an affair to satisfy his boredom, and escape from his relationship at home.

"I supposed the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well if that's the idea you can count me out . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white." (Pg 123-124) This statement is hypocritical because Tom is cheating himself, but will talk about family morals when his own marriage, and subsequently American Dream, is threatened. On the other hand, Myrtle uses Tom in order to escape the Valley of Ashes and to use him as her path to the American dream of excessive living. Daisy cheats in order to receive the attention and admiration Tom has been neglecting her of. Finally, Gatsby wants Daisy in order to fulfill his American Dream. However he does not realize that he only wants the idea of possessing Daisy, and the image he has of Daisy as the beautiful young girl every man desired before the war.

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Represents the shallow quality of the characters' lives thus signifying the hollowness of the American Dream. The wealthy have everything but still not happy. However, cheating is not limited to solely the rich class, as it is present in all social classes. All the relationships in the novel contain a motive or purpose.

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34. Gatsby 3 (Gillian's third presentation)

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34. Gatsby 3 (Gillian's third presentation)

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33. Gatsby 2 (Gillian's second presentation)

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33. Gatsby 2 (Gillian's second presentation)

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32. Gatsby 1 (Gillian's first presentation)

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32. Gatsby 1 (Gillian's first presentation)

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30. Your analysis (chapter 6 assignment)

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30. Your analysis (chapter 6 assignment)

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American OIB section -- Lycée International Nelson International. Mrs Fasquel's class.

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American OIB lit class. Mrs Fasquel. Lycée International Nelson Mandela. Nantes.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Plot
Tone
Tone & Mood
Stylistic Devices

Biography
Born in 1896, in Minnesota.
He was a second lieutenant during WWI.
He fell in love with Zelda Sayre in 1918.
Two castles in Long Island, NY, which inspired Gatsby's home
The Plaza Hotel where Tom had his party
1919
What Gatsby's parties would look like
1922
1934
His first book covers
Syntax
The Valley of Ashes, where Myrtle lives with her husband.
1925
Cynical
Sad
Mood
Pessimistic
Hopeless
Metaphors
Disillusioned
Dark
Critical
Characterization
Leonardo Di Caprio in
The Great Gatsby
.
Set in fictional East Egg, Long Island, New York during the summer of 1922
Jay Gatsby
complex character
mysterious
friendly
devoted
sad
angry
Daisy Buchanan
flat character
round character
Carey Mulligan in
The Great Gatsby.
wealthy
also a complex character
superficial
deeper part
1.Gatsby's green light
2.Valley of ashes
3.Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg
4.Gatsby's House
https://docs.google.com/document/d/177ly7gEsTkSLQaP2sG9bEnu97LShdZjXzu3VNc5hkN8/edit
By Amy, Aymie & Eléa

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Cynical Sad Mood Pessimistic Hopeless Metaphors Disillusioned Dark Critical Characterization Leonardo Di Caprio

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F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Francis Scott Fitzgerald Plot Tone Tone & Mood Stylistic Devices Biography Born

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Librarians Tanya and Valerie provide context to a classic work of American literature. Listen and learn as they talk about the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his most successful book, The Great Gatsby.

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1919-1933

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Prohibition in the United States - Wikipedia

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Promoted by the "dry" crusaders, the movement was led by pietistic Protestants and social Progressives in the Prohibition, Democratic, and Republican parties. It gained a national grass roots base through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. After 1900, it was coordinated by the Anti-Saloon League.

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eBooks@Adelaide has now officially closed

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We are very grateful to you all for your patronage and support over the years.

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21. Gatsby's American Dream: Reading The Great Gatsby Critically, Chapter 1

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21. Gatsby's American Dream: Reading The Great Gatsby Critically, Chapter 1

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In which John Green discusses the first chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
 novel The Great Gatsby, including thoughts on the role that the ideas 
of the self-made man and the American dream fuel the beginning of the novel. Themes, metaphors, and symbols are all discussed--although hopefully not in that boring and unlikable way you all find so reprehensible.

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Gatsby's American Dream: Reading The Great Gatsby Critically, Chapter 1

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20. The Great Gatsby: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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20. The Great Gatsby: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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In which John discusses critical readings of The Great Gatsby by F. 
Scott Fitzgerald, including metaphors and symbols like the color yellow, the green light at the end of the dock, the eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg, the valley of ashes, and the American dream.

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The Great Gatsby: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

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Was Gatsby Great? The Great Gatsby Part 2: Crash Course English Literature #5

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Video SparkNotes: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby summary

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16. 3rd video  (flipped class by Alyssa Galgano)

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16. 3rd video  (flipped class by Alyssa Galgano)

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15. 2nd video (flipped class by Alyssa Galgano - you need to have read up to chapter 6)

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15. 2nd video (flipped class by Alyssa Galgano - you need to have read up to chapter 6)

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Digital Story Banned Books Huckleberry Finn

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14. Video (flipped class) -- review/details

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14. Video (flipped class) -- review/details

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13. Flipped video -- The American Dream (team work) -- assignment/task

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13. Flipped video -- The American Dream (team work) -- assignment/task

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Scott Fitzgerald The Great American Dreamer

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Flipping the Classroom The American Dream Gatsby.wmv

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Here is our first effort at Ste. Genevieve to try flipping the classroom with an extensive project. Head first all the way. Students are asked to compare the American Dream of the 1920's to what would be the Dream now in present day 2012.

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They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ... But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America would be called The Great Gatsby, and one anonymous reviewer spoke for most of its first readers in describing it as "one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced".

They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ... But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America would be called The Great Gatsby, and one anonymous reviewer spoke for most of its first readers in describing it as "one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced".

The Great Gatsby would indeed create an aftermath of wonder - in ways that its initial audience could not have imagined. Almost 90 years later, Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annually sold millions of copies globally. This slim novel of fewer than 50,000 words, a story of secret visions and gaudy revels, of sudden violence and constant envy, shimmers with a magic that readers have long recognised. But over the past two years, both The Great Gatsby and its author have been seeing a marked resurgence of interest. In the last 12 months in Britain alone, there have been stage versions at Wilton's Music Hall and the King's Head theatre in London, the eight-hour reading, Gatz, was staged by the American Elevator Repair Company last year to rave reviews, and the Northern Ballet's dance adaptation will open soon at Sadler's Wells. Some of Fitzgerald's long-overlooked poems, letters and stories are suddenly being published and are circulating online. Several new books are in the works, one about The Great Gatsby's enduring appeal, and two about Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood, while my own book, which traces the genesis of The Great Gatsby, is about to be published. Gatsby has been thoroughly inspected and crawled over, lifted up and shaken out for every last detail it can surrender to its fascinated readers, but this remarkable novel has some surprises left.

Meanwhile Scott's wife, Zelda, often called the original flapper, has been enjoying her own renaissance, with a play last year at Trafalgar Studios about her life, and several books about her life coming out this year. When iconic figures re-emerge into the spotlight, you can bet that merchandising will soon follow: we are surrounded by haute couture and high street "Gatsby" dresses, speakeasies and prohibition cocktails, beads and headdresses, Gatsby clutches and iPhone covers, 1920s jazz standards and Charleston lessons.

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All this, and Baz Luhrmann, too: Luhrmann's new film version of The Great Gatsby, which will open the Cannes film festival before Charlestoning its way around the world, is released this month. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the hopeful hero with a shady past, and Carey Mulligan is Daisy, the shallow woman he adores. Joel Edgerton is very well cast as Daisy's husband, the bullying Tom Buchanan, while Tobey Maguire must create a character from the voice of the elusive, self-effacing Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator, which is probably the trickiest aspect of dramatising The Great Gatsby, harder even than bringing the magnetic, paradoxical, chimerical Jay Gatsby to life.

Gatsby has been filmed four times to date, but it has been nearly 40 years since the last big-screen adaptation, Jack Clayton's 1974 version, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. It was the first version to be filmed in colour. Luhrmann's taste for extravaganza seems to most people to suit Gatsby perfectly, although it is in fact a far more tightly controlled novel than it seems, and Luhrmann is not known for his restraint.

Previews suggest a film of decadent, epicurean extravagance and debauchery. Its reputation for revelries aside, Fitzgerald's novel in fact features just three parties, and only one of these offers paeans to its own splendours. The first party is the sordid little gathering in the flat of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's mistress, when Tom breaks Myrtle's nose for merely mentioning his wife Daisy's name. The third and final party is at Gatsby's mansion, but Fitzgerald uses it to shift the story's mood definitively from enchantment to disenchantment: Daisy and Tom attend, and their contempt for Gatsby's world exposes its tawdriness, its tinsel wrappings. Only the second party, with Nick as lyrical witness to its glories, features the magical prose that lingers in readers' minds - the girls floating among the whisperings and the moths and the champagne, yellow cocktail music rising over the blue gardens, the opera of voices pitching a key higher - and even that party has little of the saturnalia that seems to characterise Luhrmann's vision.

Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view

Although colour is central to the novel, the first surviving film version is a black-and-white noir thriller from 1949 starring Alan Ladd. In true Hollywood mid-century style, the film grows deeply uncomfortable with the reprehensible behaviour of its characters and forces them all to repent at story's end; the final moments of the film bring a cascade of changes of heart. Even Tom feels contrite and tries to save Gatsby, while Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech about saving young men like him from older men like him ("What's going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don't tell them we're wrong?"). Twenty years before the noir Gatsby was the first cinematic version, a silent film from 1926 that has been lost, although the academic Anne Margaret Daniel recently revealed in the Huffington Post that a letter in the Fitzgerald archives shows that Scott and Zelda attended a screening of the film in 1927: Zelda wrote to their daughter that it was "ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left."

Whether Fitzgerald would have enjoyed any of the subsequent stage and film versions any better is open to some question. Gatsby is about the superiority of imagination over reality, which makes it very difficult to dramatise well. It is a novel of layered projections: Gatsby projects his fantasies on to Daisy, and we can't be certain whether Nick is projecting his fantasies on to Gatsby, or is instead the only person to see past Gatsby's facade to the grandeur of the real man.

Among the dismissive early reviews of the novel was one by the influential critic HL Mencken, who called Gatsby little more than "a glorified anecdote". Understandably frustrated at the general failure of critical acumen all around him, Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson: "Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A. and Class C., if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazov ... Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." He might well have said the same thing about the dramatic versions to come, which some of us would argue move ever further away from what the novel is about, and toward our myths about it. But, beyond question, Fitzgerald would have been delighted at the adulation his masterpiece has long inspired.

When he composed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was one of the most successful writers of his era, among the decade's highest-paid writers of magazine fiction. He had been young, brash, ambitious; when he became his own success story he won Alabama belle Zelda Sayre and the pair rapidly became legendary for their revels, incarnating the "flappers and philosophers" who populated the jazz age - the name Fitzgerald himself bestowed upon the era he and Zelda still embody.

But Fitzgerald also had serious artistic ambitions, and when he began The Great Gatsby he set out to write "a consciously artistic achievement". "I want to write something new," he told his editor, Max Perkins, in the summer of 1922, "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple & intricately patterned"; later he added that his new novel must have "the very best I am capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I am capable of". From beginning to end this is a story about capability, about our reach exceeding our grasp.

What made Gatsby emphatically "new" was not its focus upon modern life, however: Fitzgerald had written of nothing else since the start of his career. Since the appearance of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, readers had been shocked at his revelations about the younger generation, the gin-swilling, party-hopping, table-dancing young men and women who shot craps and danced to the déclassé rhythms of jazz. And one of the reasons that most of its early readers couldn't see Gatsby's greatness was because it, too, seemed merely to report on their modern world.

What they couldn't yet appreciate was that this insider's guide to the enchantments of the jazz age was also an uncanny glimpse into the world to come. To take just one example, in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the most glamorous novels in history, which has itself become a kind of glittering celebrity novel. But it also demolishes the workings of celebrity, parsing the way that gossip becomes currency in the fame business, rumour a gauge of spurious greatness. Today, more often than not any artistic work itself is subordinated to the "vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" that is celebrity culture, but Gatsby's pleasures transcend the pleasure-seeking world that it indicted.

It was a world few understood better than the Fitzgeralds. When the 20s started to roar, Scott and Zelda grabbed a drink and jumped into the centre of the stage, where they stayed until 1930, when the centrifugal force of their lives suddenly sent them both reeling into extremity. Until then, the Fitzgeralds were the life and soul of the prohibition party, and he was its greatest chronicler.

"There seemed little doubt about what was going to happen," Fitzgerald wrote later. "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." By the early 1920s, he could already sense that "the whole golden boom was in the air - its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition". As the spree kicked off, Fitzgerald found that "a fresh picture of life in America began to form before my eyes". By 1924, he was painting an indelible picture of that new life, setting his new novel in 1922 (just after the "general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921"), in order to tell of "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure".

The party had begun, and all of America was invited. Wealth remained a social barrier, but it was no longer impenetrable. Speakeasies were breaking down old social barriers by creating spaces where the upper crust rubbed shoulders with the lower orders. At the same time, the new money from bootlegging and its related enterprises, and from an almost totally unregulated stock market, enabled the rapid rise of energetic men - and some women - prepared to break a law or two: and the riches to be gained soon enticed the well-educated into joining the fray. Corruption was rife, law-breaking suddenly a way of life. But even amid the boom, poverty lingered: in the underground economy of bootleggers, hustlers, gangsters, prostitutes, pimps and cocaine dealers, and in the legitimate service economy of chauffeurs and taxi drivers, bellboys and chambermaids, immigrants from Europe, or black migrant workers from the south, driven into the great migration north, and ending up in Harlem. Nightclubs sprang up where they played jazz and drank gin and danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

Fitzgerald understood early that the party couldn't last for ever. "It was borrowed time anyhow - the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls." Less than five years after Gatsby was published, the market would crash, and the Great Depression fell like a curtain over the festivities. Fitzgerald began to reflect on the age he had come to epitomise in a series of great essays - "My Lost City," "Echoes of the Jazz Age," "Early Success," and the largely forgotten "My Generation" - and stories, including the haunting "Babylon Revisited".

The jazz age may have ended, but the age of advertisement had begun, and in Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the earliest indictments of a nation in thrall to the false gods of the marketplace. Nearly a century later, his cautionary tale has returned to haunt us, warning again of the perils of boom and bust, holding a mirror up to our tarnished world. Fitzgerald's hero, the poor farm boy named Jimmy Gatz who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, who "sprang from a Platonic conception of himself", epitomises the self-made man. But Gatsby is also unmade by his faith in America's myths and lies: that meritocracy is real, that you can make yourself into whatever you want to be, that with money, anything is possible. (The historical irony is that Gatsby is destroyed because in his world money did not make everything possible - but in our world it increasingly does. Today the illusion of Jay Gatsby would not have shattered like glass against Tom Buchanan's "hard malice": Gatsby's money would have insulated him and guaranteed triumph - an outcome that Fitzgerald would have deplored more than anyone.) Attempting to pass himself off as a patrician, Gatsby tries too hard, his every gesture and word a dead giveaway to the people around him. Tom Buchanan doesn't believe that Gatsby went to Oxford because he wears a lurid pink suit. The marginal character Owl-Eyes, who has been drunk for a week, can see clearly that Gatsby is putting on a show. Gatsby is not merely a fake, he is an obvious fake.

But the novel works in the opposite direction. Its performance is almost perfect: an apparently insouciant ease belies the intensely clever, dynamic writing and carefully limited perspective. It is a novel of ellipses: to understand it well, we must learn to read between the lines, as Gatsby fails to do. The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald's language is extremely risky, always in danger of becoming as kitschy as Gatsby's pink suit. Once or twice Fitzgerald's command does slip: when he is reunited with Daisy, for example, Gatsby is delighted to discover "twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room", and when he falls in lovewith her he wants to "suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder". Sometimes even a classic falls short of our dreams - frankly, the less said about twinkle-bells of sunshine and breastfeeding wonder, the better. But for the most part Fitzgerald's prose is a kind of experiment in restrained extravagance.

Just as the style is nearly paradoxical in its ability to cut both ways, so are the novel's meanings. It is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life. As Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins wrote in 1925: it is "a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism". The hard facts of power and economics play out against the mythological promises of fantasy and ideology. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past. We find ourselves surveying the waste and wreckage after the party ends, but ready to carouse some more.

Gatsby is a fable about betrayal - of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won't simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived. By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone. But that doesn't stop him from chasing "the green light" of wealth and status, the dangled promise of power that can only create a corrupt plutocracy shored up by vast social inequality.

If that sounds familiar, it should: our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald's. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction," he insisted, adding later, "I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works". He wasn't in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. "Like so many Americans," Fitzgerald wrote in his 1927 story "Jacob's Ladder", "he valued things rather than cared about them."

The materialistic world of Gatsby is defined by social politics in a metropolitan America. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win. As the eminent critic Lionel Trilling observed in 1951: "Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realised the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity." In fact, as a young man Fitzgerald described himself as a socialist, and in the 1930s, like almost all writers of his era, he became interested in communism (although he was soon unimpressed). And it is certainly true that if Fitzgerald was a socialist, he was the original champagne socialist.

He was so far ahead of his time that we are only just catching up with him. Fitzgerald even recognised our obsession with youth, writing in 1934 of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night: "she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth." And he understood early that Americans try to liberate themselves from history, to float free from it, because part of the so-called American dream, bound up with fantasies of starting over, is the escape from time and mutability into a purely sybaritic present.

Gatsby is destroyed by the founding American myth: that the marketplace can be a religion, that the material can ever be ideal. At the beginning of the novel Fitzgerald writes of Gatsby's capacity for hope; at the end he writes of man's capacity for wonder. And the distance that the novel traverses is the defeat of that capacity, its surrender to our capacity for cynicism. All that enchantment withers up and blows away, skittering with the leaves across Gatsby's dusty lawn.

In the unforgettable closing passage of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes it clear that if his story is about America, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration. Nick Carraway wanders to the shore at the edge of the continent and imagines Dutch sailors seeing America for the first time: "Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

The trees are long gone, replaced by vulgar mansions and the wasteland of ash heaps next to which poor George and Myrtle Wilson live, "contiguous to absolutely nothing". What is left is what was always there - the imagination. But even this Fitzgerald undercuts: pandering, after all, is ministering to mere gratification. The idea that America panders to our fantasies is the precise opposite of the American dream. We are forever chasing the green light, a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. And yet although it is a lie, we can't survive without it, for we always need something commensurate to our capacity for wonder, even if it compels us into a contemplation we neither understand nor desire.

And so we falter forward, lost in the aftermath of wonder that follows The Great Gatsby.

* Sarah Churchwell's Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby will be published by Virago on 6 June. The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann is released on 10 May
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They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably ...

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That's not to say that Adams was a socialist; rather, he hoped that capitalism could become ameliorative. Because businessmen were being forced "to consider the good of society" in order to salvage their businesses, he wondered whether "broader consideration of the good of the whole nation" might emerge once "business also finds that that pays better?" Enlightened self-interest meant that it was "possible that society, still acting from the profit motive in a capitalistic and largely individualistic framework, may yet evolve a more beneficent order." To save the American dream, corporations should recognize "the close correlation of our private good with the public good," or what we now call corporate social responsibility.

Adams's ideas were welcome to a nation that was trying to correct an economic catastrophe by changing its rules; a renewed sense of mutual obligation and commonweal seemed the obvious answer to many, an ethos that they used "the American dream" to indicate. The phrase took off, and was used to proselytize for state-subsidized education, public healthcare, public housing, even, by 1939, the moral imperative to join the war in Europe.

Today, the idea that the American dream has been replaced by an American nightmare has become the nation's favourite way to discuss widespread inequality and downward social mobility. But for Adams and his readers, the nightmare was what had come before: it was in the 1920s, Adams wrote, that "the American dream was changed into a nightmare of gambling and corruption and mad spending." Then the crash had come, but what had Americans learned? The nation had since passed through "three emotional states": bewilderment, fear, and resentment, "directed against the bankers and other leaders who have betrayed their trust." It surely must come as news to us today that in the 1930s most Americans were assumed to agree that the American dream was opposed to the accumulation of vast fortunes.

By 1939, the New York Times declared, "the dominant note is one of defeat. In its mildest form we have the emphasis on the American Dream, with the implication that American life up to now has been a non-fulfillment." The American dream was not coined as a triumphalist phrase: it was always a way to talk about disillusionment. The vast debates sparked by the Depression ranged across political and moral economies, as well as financial ones. But that's my point: when its originators discussed the "American dream", they were recalling ideals that transcended the material. Today our invocations of the American dream focus almost exclusively on individuals' material prospects - a usage Adams and his contemporaries would surely have viewed as symptomatic of our moral bankruptcy.

Given our impoverished understanding of the original meanings of the "American dream," it should come as no surprise that readings of its most emblematic novel are often similarly inadequate. We project on to Fitzgerald our nostalgic, simplistic ideas about the 1920s as one big party, and assume that Gatsby glorifies the greatest parties of them all. (If you doubt that this is a common take on the novel, just watch Baz Lurhmann's film adaptation from last year.)

A brief example: one of the popular songs that Fitzgerald quotes in Gatsby, "Ain't We Got Fun," sounds like a trivial, frivolous tune. It's actually a song that satirises economic inequality, with the refrain, "One thing's sure, and nothing's surer / The rich get richer and the poor get ... children." It was a hit in 1921, a year of sharp recession: the American economy began surging in 1922, the year in which Gatsby is set. Gatsby is as much a post-recession novel as it is a boom novel, and it associates boom with corruption. Gatsby is linked to every fraud of a fraudulent era: bootlegging (the equivalent of drug-dealing today), financial swindles, gambling, and even the oil business, which by 1924 was a byword for government corruption in the wake of the Teapot Dome bribery scandal.

It has become a cliché that Jay Gatsby allegorizes America itself: idealistic, full of promise, easily corrupted, endlessly desiring, endlessly failing. For the novel's narrator Nick Carraway, Gatsby's "incorruptible dream" redeems his material corruption, but the novel leaves room for doubt. Just before Gatsby's death, when he's lost hope in his dream, Nick imagines him looking out at a frightening "new world, material without being real..." Without the dream to ennoble it, the merely material is "grotesque" and unrealized, not just meaningless, but poisonous.

This is the new world that Gatsby discovers, just before Nick turns his attention in the novel's famous closing passage to the New World, which may also be material without being real, a nation that Fitzgerald has earlier described as consumed by the "business" of serving "a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty." When Nick imagines Europeans seeing America for the first time, and finding in it "something commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder," he invokes not the Puritans but the Dutch sailors - the merchants. Greeting these commercially motivated aspirants, Fitzgerald writes, the land itself "pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams." The dreams may be great, but if they are pandered to, then they are also illusions.

Fitzgerald never uses the phrase "American dream" in the novel, but he comes close - and suggests in 1925 that it is a lie, or at least a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. "His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it," Fitzgerald writes in closing, but "it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." But Gatsby always believes in the green light, that entwined symbol of hope, renewal, envy, permission to go, and the colour of money. For Fitzgerald, Gatsby's vast wealth is a sign of the failure of the American dream, not its success.

The metaphor we might consider is foreclosure: to preclude, to end possibilities; and in commercial terms, to block the possibility of redeeming a loan. Redemption becomes foreclosed, the dream is already lost behind Gatsby before he even tries to grasp it. The majesty of the dream means we cannot relinquish it, but its glory is so diminished that we are now blinded to what the dream really was, left only with dispossession - not only of very real American homes but also of the greater dreams they once symbolized, which Fitzgerald elsewhere describes as "an effort toward some commonweal, an effort difficult to estimate, so closely does it press against us still." Fitzgerald suggests in Gatsby that we keep thinking our dreams should be bigger, when in fact they need to be better. It's a lesson we have yet to learn, and the more we invoke what we think we mean by "the American dream," the more the dream recedes before us, just as Fitzgerald predicted it would.

In 1940, a New York Times editorial remarked that when the Americans of the turn of the century "spoke of the American Dream, they meant the American hope, the American aspiration, the American ideal. When people wrote of the American Dream after 1930, they meant the American mirage, the American illusion... the American lie." In less than a decade, the American dream had been so absorbed into the national imagination that America's paper of record thought it was a phrase that dated back centuries - that only recently had the American dream been revealed as a lie. But it was a recent invention, and as Adams predicted, each generation would need to relearn the lessons of inequality and disappointment, an innocence we keep losing anew. Fitzgerald understood in the midst of the 1920s what most would only see in retrospect: that "the dead dream" will always fight on, as we try to touch the intangible, "struggling unhappily, undespairingly" towards what we keep losing.

Sarah Churchwell delivered the London Library Lecture at Hay last week and is author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (Virago). Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

READ: F Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited, one of finest short stories in the English language and a perfect morality tale for today

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That's not to say that Adams was a socialist; rather, he hoped that capitalism could become ameliorative. Because businessmen were being forced "to consider the good of society" in order to salvage their businesses, he wondered whether "broader consideration of the good of the whole nation" might emerge once "business also finds that that pays better?"

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The Great Gatsby a literary classic written by F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't one of my favorite novels because it's written by one of my favorite authors, but it's written in a way that makes Jay Gatsby one of literatures best anti-heroes.The impression you first gain from Gatsby is that he is a hero, but in...

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Hero vs Anti Hero Examples | Anti-hero Definition & Meaning

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Compare hero & anti hero with storyboards! Always a dynamic character, such as the protagonist, with anti hero examples character flaws for anti-hero definition

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8. Online tool (see n°7) Storyboard that (Digital Storytelling)

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8. Online tool (see n°7) Storyboard that (Digital Storytelling)

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7. Antihero (Jay Gatsby) -- example of assignment/task

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7. Antihero (Jay Gatsby) -- example of assignment/task

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The Great Gatsby - Antihero Storyboard by rebeccaray

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The Great Gatsby - Hero or Antihero? Jay Gatsby as an antihero examples and definition DEFINITION WHY GREAT GATSBY? EXAMPLE 1 EXAMPLE 2 EXAMPLE 3 Pharmacy

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Although an "Anti-Hero" once referred to one specific kind of character archetype, over time the term has evolved to cover several, many very different but all having one key aspect in common: serving as contrast to traditional hero types such as ...

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a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities... See the full definition

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An antihero, or antiheroine, is a protagonist in a story who lacks conventional heroic qualities and attributes such as idealism, courage, and morality. Although antiheroes may sometimes do the right thing, it is not always for the right reasons, often acting primarily out of self-interest or in ways that defy conventional ethical codes.

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"The Great Gatsby" | Introduction: Overview & Analysis | 60second Recap®

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"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald | Introduction: Overview & Analysis | 60second Recap® Study Guide Video by Jenny Sawyer, http://goo.gl/T8Rhu5 Think "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald is all about lawn parties and iced tea? Give us 60 seconds. We'll set you straight.