The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

I. About the Author• Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was

born middle class in St. Paul, Minnesota 1896

• He attended Princeton, wrote for the school literary journal, dropped out of school and joined the army.

• He continued to write and publish fiction

• He met his wife-to-be Zelda while stationed in Alabama

• Zelda was a self-absorbed “flapper” and she came from a wealthy family in Montgomery, Alabama

• After the army he moved to New York, worked in advertising, published short fiction and magazines

• He earned enough money to marry Zelda by 1920, they moved to Long Island where he wrote The Great Gatsby

• The Fitzgeralds had one daughter –Scottie

• They had a reputation for a hard-drinking, fast-living, self-indulgence (typical of the rich during the 1920s) They both became very popular during their lifetime. People saw them as the royal couple of the 1920s.

II. The 1920s Roaring Twenties

(1920s)

–1. Rebelled against the violence of the war

–2. Were interested in living it up…

• 3. Also called the “Jazz Age," it was a decade of economic progress (rich getting richer), prohibition, gangsters, social and racial unrest…. Right before the Great Depression

The novel is set in the 1920s in three main places: 1. two wealthy fictional suburbs on the eastern tip of Long Island 2. in an “industrial wasteland” between those two suburbs and New York City 3. in Manhattan

III. Setting

•The character Gatsby is said to live in a house that looks like Hotel de Ville in Normandy France –a mansion

IV. Point of View

• 1. Point of view of the novel is 1st person. It is narrated by one of the characters- Nick Carraway.

• 2. The novel starts with Nick recounting the events of the novel. He recalls the events of two years before. He does not reveal all he learned to us at once, in chronological order… he flashes backward and forward in time as he tells the tale.

V. Themes to look for• 1. Corruption of the

American Dream- early Europeans believed that one could start a new life in America, but humans have corrupted that dream (notice how some of the characters have corrupted this dream).

• 2. Reality versus Illusion – humans tend to live under illusions instead of in reality (notice which character displays this)

• 3. Self- Discovery – Once people experience life and look at life from more than one perspective, they will understand the world and become wiser. (Notice this in Nick.)

VI. Literary Elements to look for

1. Symbolism

• Places, things, people that stand for something other than the literal - notice color symbolism

• 2. juxtaposition- the technique of placing different, opposing scenes next to each other for effect

•3. Flashbacks-most of the novel is a flashback –goes backward in time