Compare And Contrast Hemingway And The Great Gatsby

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Wealth: Fitzgerald vs. Hemingway When the 1920's came about there was a new way of living in America. With the war, women were integrated into the 'masculine' jobs. Old traditions were pushed aside for the new traditions. New inventions brought more movement and freedom to the country, cars enabled people to travel more easily. The stock market crash started the 1930's with a bang. With 14 million Americans unemployed, the national income dropped by more than half. With Roosevelt's New Deal's the Depression slowly lifted ("The United States..."). F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Heminway both had their own depictions of wealth in their stories. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1986 to Edward Fitzgerald …show more content…

Scott Fitzgerald depicts 1920s America as a whole in The Great Gatsby. It surrounds the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. The Great Gatsby has an overarching cynicism, greed and empty pursuit of pleasure that surpasses noble values is portrayed in the story. The rise of the stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden increase in the national wealth and a newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at increased levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American families with old wealth looked down on the newly rich industrialists and speculators. In the book there is a clear riff between the "new money" and "old money", represented by the West Egg and East Egg. Fitzgerald thought that the American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s, however, easy money and relaxed social values corrupted the dream, especially on the East Coast. In the book Fitzgerald portrays the newly rich as being vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and taste. In contrast, the old aristocracy possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance. Though it seems that what the aristocracy has in taste lacks in heart, as they are careless about worrying about hurting others(The Great

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