The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

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The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

• Social and Historical Background
• The Context

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The Great Gatsby

• In 1922 F Scott Fitzgerald announced his
  decision to write something new extraordinary
  and beautiful and simple and intricately
  patterned. Self made millionaire Jay Gatsby
  embodies some of Fitzgeralds and his countrys
  most abiding obsessions money, ambition, greed
  and the promise of new beginnings.
• From review of The Great Gatsby The Lost
  Generation bookstore (online)

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The Great Gatsby

• Published in 1925
• Significantly sandwiched between WW1 and WW2
• An American novel

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1920s America

• Fitzgerald is renowned for chronicling the Jazz
  Age
• This was the decade that followed the First World
  War
• This time was also know as The Golden Twenties or
  the Roaring Twenties

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1920s America

• These years were full of pleasure seeking and
  reckless exuberance
• Fitzgerald said America was going on the
  greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was
  going to be plenty to tell about it.

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1920s America

• Some people considered this age to be the Lost
  Generation
• A generation disillusioned by the senseless
  slaughter of WW1, they were cynical and
  disdainful of Victorian Notions and propriety of
  their elders
• Ernest Hemingway captured the essence of this
  Lost Generation in his novel The Sun Also Rises
  (1926)

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1920s Culture
Charlie Chaplin
Edward Hopper Nighthawks
Picasso
Silent Movies
Matisse
Kandinsky
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Music/Jazz

• Duke Ellington
• Cole Porter
• Gershwin
• Maurice Chevalier

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Writers

• Ernest Hemingway
• Gertrude Stein
• Henry Miller
• T S Eliot
• Dorothy Parker

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The Mass Market

• Population of USA doubled 50yrs before WW1
• There was a problem with meeting basic needs
• Solution Mass production. Henry Ford was the
  first to use an assembly line to make Model T
  cars in 1913

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The Mass Market

• There was massive growth in commodities
• There was standardization across the country
• Everything was made available to everyone
• Therefore most people wanted

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Advertising

• As a result Advertising became big business
• Brand names were more prominent
• Advertising created the desire for purchasing
• The taste of the nation was shaped

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Conspicuous Consumption

• A term coined by an American social scientist
• A response to the over whelming amount of rich
  businessmen with power in America
• They showed off their wealth with ostentatious
  houses and extravagant behaviour

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Conspicuous Consumption

• Veblen called this Conspicuous Consumption
  because he thought the lifestyle was wasteful and
  caused more poverty in the lower classes
• People liked to announce their status, never
  caring about the effect on others

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Prohibition and Organised Crime
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Prohibition and Organised Crime

• From 1920 to 1933, the manufacture, sale, and
  transport of alcohol was prohibited in the United
  States
• It was intended to raise the countrys moral
  standards
• It had the opposite effect!
• Apparently in 1925 there were 100,000
  speakeasies in New York alone

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Prohibition and Organised Crime

• Bootlegging became big business
• Criminals, such as Al Capone made their fortunes
  producing and selling illegal alcohol
• There was an illegal economy organised by
  powerful gangs
• Money was made through gambling and protection
  rackets

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Here is Hollywoods view
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Women

• In the Jazz Age the Flapper was born
• The typical Flapper was a young woman who was
  thought of as fast and maybe even a little brazen
• She symbolized an age anxious to enjoy itself

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Again, a Hollywood interpretation, but listen
closely to the words
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1920s America

• The End