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Knowledge & Revision Book Context: F. Scott Fitzgerald his life, work & place in American Literature F. Scott Fitzgerald occupies a central place within the canon of twentieth century American Literature; texts like The Great Gatsby and The Damned and the Beautiful are seminal moments in the emergence of a powerful and tragic body of work. Fitzgerald was born on September 24th 1896 at the turn of the twentieth century. His early life witnessed a broad array of major historical events that came to encapsulate the sense of history that underpins many of his novels; the sinking of The Titanic, The First World War, and later, The Wall Street Crash all came to shape a view of life that is explored both viscerally and painfully in Fitzgerald’s writing. Of the five novels that Fitzgerald wrote, all of them, to one degree or another, are informed by arguably the greatest influence on Fitzgerald’s development as an author: the Jazz Age. This period in Fitzgerald’s life – that marked the collapse of old, traditional morality and values in favour of an obsession with free market capitalism – was central to the crafting of his characters and the events of his narratives. Fitzgerald’s life was marked by excess and tragedy: he was an alcoholic for much of his life and his wife, Zelda, suffered from schizophrenia. However, this hides a life lived in celebrity during the 1920s in New York; Fitzgerald and his wife were major players in New York society, thanks, in part, to the cultural elite’s reception of his novel. However, Fitzgerald also spent much of his time in financial difficulty having to fund his alcoholism and his wife’s medical care. In turn, Fitzgerald had to borrow money from his literary agent who eventually refused to help him, leaving the author to abandon his long-time friend. Arguably, this points to one of the many complex themes of his novels: the idea that money is itself an evil that pervades much that is good; certainly in Gatsby it brings the characters little by way of happiness, Fitzgerald died on December 21st 1940. Context: America in the 1920s The Great Gatsby has often been described as the ‘definitive’ or ‘conclusive’ representation of life in America in the 1920s. While this may be subjective, there is clearly a sense in which the novel is centrally concerned with America in the aftermath of the First World War. Historians and economists now believe that the 1920s in the United States saw levels of economic growth seen only afterwards in the 1950s and 1990s. That is, periods of sustained economic development which brought about a general social sense of wealth and affluence for all members of US society. Indeed, the name the ‘roaring twenties’ - as this period is referred to in Europe - reflects the growth of wealth and materialism during this period. That said, the greater financial and economic growth in the United States is counterpointed by a period of moral paradox. On the one hand this is the period of Prohibition: on the other, a time of greater acceptance for the Ku Klux Klan. This morally questionable counterpoint underlies the movement towards a morally ambiguous country that appears to be dispensing with the virtues of its Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. However, these moral questions are further obscured by a period in which man seems to be at the forefront of invention and adventure: in 1925 the colour television is invented; in 1927 Charles Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic on his own. These moments of invention move the focus away from moral and theological abstracts to that which man can achieve materially. It is in this way that the tension between what some historians see as a spiritual decline, and others a booming decade, come to the fore. Fitzgerald, it seems, is interested in all aspects of the 1920s in his novels, and particularly in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is a character who was engaged in bootlegging. At the same time, he is almost celebrated by Nick Carraway, which confuses the moral paradigm further. The novel therefore, much like America in the 1920s, is a paradox of virtue and vice; morality and materialism. Context: The Jazz Age The Jazz Age is the period that began in the 1920s and gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States. The advent of the radio made possible the upsurge in popularity of dance and Jazz in the US. The birth of Jazz in the US is widely accredited to the African American population but, during the Jazz Age, the white middle classes adopted it as their own, recalibrated the genre. Cities like New York and Chicago became the cultural centres for the upsurge in popularity amongst the white middle classes of the time. However, on the fringes of these major cities, the birth of the radio made it possible for members of all communities to have experience of the newly-popularised form. The Jazz Age is important for all kinds of symbolic reasons: primarily, the sense of ‘fun’ that it came to represent. This led to a cultural realignment: of generation against generation, of women against men. In turn, what we see when we look at the Jazz Age is a period in which old assumptions are being questioned, which is to say that many young Americans came to rebel against their elders; the subject of women’s sexuality came to the fore and was celebrated once more. These were times – in the urban areas at least – of great social change. However, this period is also a creature of it economic condition: as social wealth and mobility increased because of greater wealth and aspiration, so too did the sense of freedom and hope enjoyed by the middle and upper classes. Fitzgerald takes these ideas as central to his narrative: the proliferation of parties in the novel reflects the sense of celebration and fun that is a characteristic of the time. Equally, the complicated sexual relationships of the characters, and the male desire for Daisy Buchanan, reflects the emerging acceptance in the New York of the time, that women could be sexually powerful and confident women. However, it is also interesting to consider the impact of the ending on the characters: all of the partying and joviality is replaced with a sense of foreboding and disappointment. Indeed, we come to see that all of the hollowness of the decadence and materialism comes to bear on the characters of Fitzgerald’s novel, much in the same way as it does on their real-life counterpoints in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Suggested Tasks & Activities – Chapter-by-chapter