Self-Made Man In The Great Gatsby

In the 1922 novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby , Jay Gatsby is a man that is surrounded by mystery for most of the novel. He is often regarded as a self-made man and thus is suspected by many of those who come from ‘Old Money’ to have dirty money. Gatsby flaunts his wealth and tends to confuse all who ask about his money or his past with fast and complex stories and proof that he always keeps handy. This essay will delve into how Gatsby fits the term self-made man, how this can be explained and how he may sometimes take the term too literally.
To begin, one must know that Gatsby is not his real name. His birth name is Jay Gatz and he was a farm boy from the midwest who left home to make something of himself. Later he meets

Dan Cody, who is everything that he want to become, and takes it upon himself to learn from Cody, and changes from Jay Gatz to Jay Gatsby. At Cody’s death he is cheated out of his inheritance by Cody’s mistress and is pulled into WW1. Jay fell in love with a woman named Daisy Fay, who in his absence is swept away by a rich man by the name of Tom Buchanan. This motivates him to become rich and and gain enough social status to win Daisy away from Tom.
Gatsby took full advantage of the Prohibition as well as the money to be made from it to become rich, and build connections with mobsters, namely Meyer Wolfsheim. Jay became a self-made rich man using the skills acquired from Dan Cody, and connections from men like Wolfsheim. Although his actions could be viewed as criminal, Jay Gatsby, in the midst of the 1920s had gone from a poor farmer boy to one of the wealthiest men in all of New York. He was known as a self made millionaire who kept close to his morals despite the money.
In this essay the topic addressed was self made men, and how Jay Gatsby from the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby fit the definition. Not only that but how he displayed it and how it was explained in the novel how he earned his wealth through work and not inheritance like those with old money. There was also a short piece on how he hides from the public how he truly got his money.