Many things can influence change in a country, especially in the United States. The 1920s was a time in which many things occurred that changed society forever. The uproar over prohibition and economic growth had a large influence in literature as well, in particular the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The most notable of his works, was The Great Gatsby, written in 1925. The novel draw large influence from what was going on in that time period. With prohibition a popular topic going on in the 1920s, there was a lot of underground and illegal distribution. Due to alcohol being prohibited, the demand was very high and the 1920s still saw an increase in alcoholism and partying. All this also contributed to the changing of the American Dream. Many of these changes were not really being regarded until F. Scott Fitzgerald released The Great Gatsby, which in turn showed society in a fictional point of view, what America was turning into. The novel changed the country, but not only drew focused on the problems going on at the time, but also was influenced by Fitzgerald’s life. Influenced by his life in the 1920’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reflects the changing American Dream and societal values.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on 1896 from an Irish-Catholic family. By age 13, he was already writing, seeing some of his work already appear on print. Fitzgerald loved writing, and ended up attending Princeton but his devotion to literature led him to be on on academic probation. Joining the Army after Princeton, his fears of dying in World War I, he left the army to fulfill his dreams to write. He quickly wrote a novel and sent it to a publisher. Seeing the originality and good plot, Fitzgerald was encouraged by the publisher to ke...
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...coholic beverages such as liquor, wine, or beer. Comparing these statistics from 1939, to another search conducted in 2008, there has been a nine-percent increase, leaving the percentage of Americans who drink alcoholic beverages at 67 percent. Similarly, the consequences of prohibition from the 1920s, which prohibited the consumption and selling of alcohol, also saw a dramatic increase in statistics. Although it was illegal, statistics show that even during prohibition, the consumption of alcohol was at an all-time high. Like prohibition in the 1920s, the U.S is facing a similar problem with the increasing use of marijuana. Also illegal, marijuana use has seen a large increase over the past decade. Research made in 2013 found that 48 percent of half of the population of adults use marijuana, an increase from 2001, which recorded only 38 percent had used marijuana.
Looking back in American history, America has tended to have different phases lasting around ten years. The nineteen-twenties will always be remembered in history because of the triumphal progress in many different areas. The twenties were a time of great change in America in many different areas. The changes were in the laws, the lifestyle of women especially and the moral values that they lived by. One of the major events that sculpted this era was prohibition. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the life of crime associated with prohibition causing the enormous transformation of Jay Gatz to Jay Gatsby, and also causing a tremendous change in America.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby in order to display the wretchedness of upper-class society in the United States. The time period, the 1920s, was an age of new opulence and wealth for many Americans. As there is an abundance of wealth today, there are many parallels between the behavior of the wealthy in the novel and the behavior of today’s rich. Fitzgerald displays the moral emptiness and lack of personal ethics and responsibility that is evident today throughout the book. He also examines the interactions between social classes and the supposed noblesse oblige of the upper class. The idea of the American dream and the prevalence of materialism are also scrutinized. All of these social issues spoken about in The Great Gatsby are relevant in modern society. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this novel as an indictment of a corrupt American culture that is still present today.
The 1920s was of time of class, rich people thrived, woman started to revolutionize, music, and everything started to change. Major things happened during this time period including, discrimination against minorities and women pushing for natural rights. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of, The Great Gatsby, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota during the 1920s into a family with high social aspirations but little wealth. He attended Princeton University in 1913 in hopes of becoming something more in life but failed to graduate. After serving for the army Fitzgerald wrote his first book and became wealthy and famous( Wiggins, Grant. The American Experience: California. 2010.pp 729). Two of many themes in the The Great Gatsby are resistance to change and the “new woman”. There were numerous events that led to these changes in the 1920s and many had a huge significance to the nation and still affect us today.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic character in both his fiction life and his real life and “…was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self"(Voegeli). The inspiration for The Great Gatsby came from the experience Fitzgerald had with a Jewish bootlegger and his symbolism for the book is “never more ingenious than in his depiction of the bankruptcy of the old agrarian myth” (Trask). The realization that America had been changed and transformed into a new world arose. America has become a new world with a new set of traditional beliefs. The beliefs were onset by the growing fields of industrialization and urbanization. America is now a place in which “a revolution in manners and morals was inevitable” (Trask). The trend of this new life style and tradition was reinforced by World War 1 and the writers critiqued the traditional faiths. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald paints a story about love and intrigue. He shows the possibility of movement between the different social classes during the Roaring Twenties in the United States. The American dream was the thought that people who had talent in the 'land of opportunity' could gain success if they followed a set of well-defined behavioral rules. During this time period, Americans believed that satisfaction would automatically follow success. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald raises many important political questions: "What does it mean to live well, and on what terms people can live together?” and it shows America's thoughts and answers to these essential questions (Voegeli). These questions are referring to the different social classes and be...
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald reflects the American society in the 1920’s and the different social groups that coexisted. The Great Gatsby portrays the failure of the American Dream, where corruption, illegal trading, superficial relationships, and social classes take the main roles. The author demonstrates how the American dream has become a pursuit of wealth and materialism through the exploration of the upper class. In addition, the author uses characterization to reflect the upper class in the 1920’s as two separate groups: the “old” money, and the “new money”. These are shown through the main characters in the novel, such as Gatsby and Tom Buchanan.
In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the 1920s are displayed as a time alcohol, parties, and glamour. The Volstead Act banned the commercial distribution of alcohol making it more appealing than ever before. The ban led to the development of speakeasies, illegal nightclubs where people would gather to drink, dance, and have the time of their lives. The 20s were also a decade of economic prosperity. People bought everything they could afford and even more was bought on credit with little regard for possible future consequences. Women wore short dresses, cut their hair, and dressed much more revealingly than the Gibson Girls of the past decade dressed in floor length dresses and high collars. It was the age of movie stars and radio. Also,
Americans in the 1920s were fresh off of World War I and freshly into the Prohibition Era. The American Dream was well defined- a life of wealth, comfort, and exuberance. After a World War I victory, the Dream was thought to be in the near future for every American. The country was seen as a world superpower, wealthy after the devastation of a war fought entirely overseas and brimming with hope and possibility- at least on the surface. Despite the highs experienced by much of the country, it wasn't without its problems. Crime violence was benevolently running the streets and the Speakeasies beyond the reach of full Prohibition, the world was being set-up for The Great Depression, and America was brimming with members of the "Lost Generation." This generation and the hypocrisies and idiosyncracies of the "American Dream" inspired a rising and influential set of artists, poets and writers, and a list of best-selling books that both reflected and inspired the generation that devoured them. Authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis were some of the popular fiction authors of the 1920s who both entertained and delighted their readers, while also offering an intelligent reality check about the limits and realities of the American Dream.
Fitzgerald knew at a young, undeveloped age that he wanted to be a writer. Born September 24, 1986 into a broken family in Minnesota (F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great American Dreamer), it was easiest for him to turn to writing with...
To view a time in history as accurately as possible, one must incorporate works created “in period”; things such as books, music and art should be invaluable to the true historian. These things give us a lens through which we can see back into the world of that age. Many critics say that The Great Gatsby read the book as a commentary on American society during the 1920’s; they use the book as a historical reference that tells us what part of society was like. The work The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald conveys a position on the United States in the 1920’s using a myriad of different techniques embedded throughout the novel.
Jazz musicians, labor workers, and river boatmen were quickly taking to its euphoric effects (Gettman, 1995). Smoking marijuana also became more popular during Prohibition when more people began cultivation of the plant and importing it into the U.S. to replace alcohol (Doweiko, 2002). In 1942, marijuana was removed from the United States Pharacopoeia and the Federal Government began to criminalize non-medicinal marijuana possession and use (Carter et al., 2003). Marijuana became extremely popular in the 1960's and, today, is considered the most widely used illicit drug in the world, Canada, and the United States (Gettman, 1995). Pharmacology and Chemistry of Marijuana Cannabis is known to contain over 400 chemicals in which about 70 are classified as plant cannabinoids.
The idea of changing social class in the 1920s is a common theme highlighted throughout The Great Gatsby. Through the characters of Gatsby and Myrtle who both fail in their desperate attempt to live out The American Dream, Fitzgerald successfully convinces the reader that The American Dream for most of America at this time was just that of a dream and was not obtainable for many. Fitzgerald explained that The American Dream was a highly unrealistic standard that so many tr...
Considered as the defining work of the 1920s, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925, when America was just coming out of one of the most violent wars in the nation’s history. World War 1 had taken the lives of many young people who fought and sacrificed for our country on another continent. The war left many families without fathers, sons, and husbands. The 1920s is an era filled with rich and dazzling history, where Americans experienced changes in lifestyle from music to rebellion against the United States government. Those that were born into that era grew up in a more carefree, extravagant environment that would affect their interactions with others as well as their attitudes about themselves and societal expectations.
The 1920’s were a time of economic indulgences. The stock market was in a period of wild growth and Americans were enjoying their newfound prosperity. America just came off a triumphant success in the First World War and the 1920’s and was the outlandish victory party. The New York Times said, “Gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession” of the 1920’s. The morality which the common citizen had previously upheld became corrupted, and the American Dream, which once meant making a living through integrity and hard work, became tainted, emphasizing the quick, not necessarily honest, acquisition of money and wasteful spending. The life, desires, and ultimate failure of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald deprecates
Fitzgerald’s personal life was just as intriguing as his writing. He was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul Minnesota as the son of Edward Fitzgerald and Mary Mcquillan. His mother was occupied as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul while his father was an old Southerner (Bruccoli). The family relocated to New York after his father failed as a manufacturer of wicker. His father took the job as a salesman for Procter and Gamble, but not soon after, Edward was dismissed and once again, the family found themselves back in St. Paul. In the Fall of 1913. Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton where he dove deep into the literary life. He made contributions to the Princeton Triangle Club, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Literary Magazine, as well as forming relationships with students who pursued a similar dream of being a writer...
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early life was filled with moments that allowed him to realize who he was as a person, and as a writer. Fitzgerald was born on September 24th, 1896 to Edward and Mary (www.sc.edu). His father was an American with extreme pride in his family’s past while his mother, Mary, was raised with her Irish parents’ traditions and culture (www.sc.edu). Both of Fitzgerald’s parents were strict Catholics which influences Fitzgerald’s value in religion (www.sc.edu). Due to his father’s aristocracy and his mother’s wealthy inheritance, Fitzgerald was raised in a wealthy, middle class family (www.sc.edu). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing career began at St. Paul Academy where he began writing for the school’s newspaper (www.pbs.org). After attending St. Paul Academy, his schooling career spread to the Newman Catholic Pr...