Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald

1
Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great
Gatsby

• English III Honors
• Mr. Higgins

2
The Life and Times of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, now regarded as the
  spokesman for the Jazz Age of the 1920s, was
  born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896.
• Educated at parochial prep schools, receiving
  strict Roman Catholic training. In the fall of
  1909, during his second year at St. Paul Academy,
  Fitzgerald began publishing in the school
  magazine. Sent East for a disciplined education,
  he entered The Newman School, whose student body
  came from wealthy Catholic families all over the
  country.
• Upon his grandmothers death, Fitzgerald and the
  family received a rather handsome inheritance,
  yet Scott seemed always to be cast into a society
  where others enjoyed more affluence than he.
  However, like Gatsby, a self-made man, Fitzgerald
  became the embodiment of the American Dream.

3

• Thanks to another relatives money, Fitzgerald
  was able to enroll in Princeton in 1913. He never
  graduated from the Ivy League school in fact, he
  failed several courses during his undergraduate
  years. However, he wrote revues for the Triangle
  Club, Princetons musical comedy group, and
  donned swishy, satiny dresses to romp onstage
  alongside attractive chorus girls. Years later,
  after enjoying some literary fame, he was asked
  to speak at Princeton, an occasion which endeared
  the school to him in new ways. Today, Princeton
  houses his memoirs, including letters from Ernest
  Hemingway, motion picture scripts, scrapbooks,
  and other mementos.

4

• He withdrew from Princeton and entered the war in
  1917, commissioned a second lieutenant in the
  army. While in Officers Candidate School in
  Alabama, he met and fell in love with Zelda
  Sayre. He never made it to the European front,
  but he did come to the attention of New York
  publishers by the end of the war. Despite Zeldas
  breaking their engagement, they became re-engaged
  that fall. Their marriage produced one
  daughterScottie, who died in 1986. In 1919 his
  earnings totaled 879 the following year,
  following the publication of This Side of
  Paradise, an instant success, his earnings
  increased to 18,000.

5

• As early as 1920, Fitzgerald had in mind a tragic
  novel. He wrote to the president of Princeton
  that his novel would say something fundamental
  about America, that fairy tale among nations. He
  saw Americas history as a great pageant and
  romance, the history of all aspirationnot just
  the American dream but the human dreamand, he
  wrote, If I am at the end of it that too is a
  place in the line of the pioneers. Gatsbys
  vision for this book would be realized in 1925
  when The Great Gatsby was published.

6

• In the late 1920s, Fitzgerald, Zelda, and Scottie
  moved to Europe, near the French Riviera, where
  Francis first met Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude
  Stein, and Edith Wharton other American
  expatriates who comprised the so called Lost
  Generation.
• In 1930, Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
  She would be institutionalized two years later.
• To help pay for her medical expenses, Fitzgerald
  wrote some 160 short stories for magazines
  works which, by his own admission, lacked luster.
  Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to write
  screenplays, and struggled unsuccessfully to
  complete a final novel, The Last Tycoon. He died
  in December of 1940 after a lifelong battle with
  alcohol and a series of heart attacks. Zelda died
  in 1948 when the Maryland hospital at which she
  was a patient caught fire.

7
Historical Context

• The Jazz Age The Roaring Twenties The Jazz Age
  began soon after World War I (1914-1918) and
  ended with the 1929 stock market crash.
  Victorious, American experienced an economic boom
  and expansion. Politically, the country made
  major advances in the area of womens
  independence. During the war, women had enjoyed
  economic independence by taking over jobs for the
  men who fought overseas. After the war, they
  pursued financial independence and a freer
  lifestyle. This was the time of the flappers,
  young women who dressed up in jewelry and feather
  boas, wore bobbed hairdos, and danced the
  Charleston.

8
Historical Context

• Prohibition As a reaction against the fads and
  liberalism that emerged in the big cities after
  the war, the U.S. government and conservative
  elements in the country advocated and imposed
  legislation restricting the manufacture and
  distribution of liquor. The Womens Christian
  Temperance Movement, National Prohibition Party,
  and others, viewed alcohol as a dangerous drug
  that disrupted lives and families. They felt it
  the duty of the government to relieve the
  temptation of alcohol by banning it altogether.
  The 18th Amendment, passed in 1919, outlawed the
  manufacture, sale, or transportation of
  intoxicating liquors on a national level. Nine
  months later, the Volstead Act provided the
  enforcement means for such measures. Ultimately,
  however, Prohibition did little to curb the
  drinking of the liquor-loving public, and
  speakeasies, a type of illegal bar, cropped up
  everywhere.

9
Historical Context

• Urban Corruption Prohibition precipitated the
  growth of a large underworld in many big cites,
  including Chicago and New York. For years, New
  York was under the control of the Irish
  politicians of Tammany Hall, which assured that
  corruption persisted. Bootlegging, prostitution,
  and gambling thrived, while police took money
  from shady operators engaged in these activities
  and overlooked the illegalities. A key player in
  the era of Tammany Hall was Arnold Rothstein
  (Mayor Wolfsheim in the novel). Through his
  campaign contributions to the politicians, he was
  entitled to a monopoly of prostitution and
  gambling in New York until he was murdered in
  1928.

10
Historical Context

• The Black Sox Fix of 1919 The 1919 World Series
  was the focus of a scandal that rocked the sports
  world. The Chicago White Sox were heavily favored
  to win the World Series against the Cincinatti
  Reds. Due to low game attendance during World War
  I, players salaries were cut back. In defiance,
  the White Sox threatened to strike against their
  owner, Charles Comiskey, who had refused to pay
  them a higher salary.

11
Historical Context

• Frustrated by the White Sox management,
  firstbaseman Arnold Gandil, approached a
  bookmaker and gambler, Joseph Sullivan, with an
  offer to intentionally lose the series. Eight
  players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson (of
  Field of Dreams) participated in the scam.
  Arnold Rothstein helped raise money to pay the
  players and began placing bets that the Sox would
  lose.
• The Sox went one to lose one of the greatest
  upsets in history. When the scandal was exposed,
  due to a number of civil cases involving those
  who lost money on the game, the eight players
  were banned from baseball for life and forever
  dubbed the Black Sox.

12
The Great Gatsby A Response to the 1920s

• The Great Gatsby was published in 1925
• Set on Long Island, New York, during Prohibition,
  in nine chapters, the novel presents the rise and
  fall of Jay Gatsby, as related in a first-person
  narrative by Nick Carraway. Gatsbys ill-gotten
  wealth is acquired solely to gain acceptance into
  the sophisticated, moneyed world of the woman he
  loves, Daisy Fay Buchanan. His romantic illusions
  about the power of money to buy respectability
  and the love of Daisythe "golden girl" of his
  dreamsare enmeshed with episodes that depict
  what Fitzgerald viewed as the callousness and
  moral irresponsibility of the affluent American
  society of the 1920s.

13
Key Concepts

• Appearance vs. Reality
• Clash between East and West
• Class conflict
• Corruption of the American Dream
• Moral bankruptcy

14
The American Dream and The Great Gatsby

• The American Dream with hard work, courage, and
  determination one can achieve financial and
  personal success.
• What the American dream has become is a question
  under constant discussion, and some believe that
  it has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a
  measure of success and/or happiness.

15
Origins of the American Dream

• European explorers and the PuritansDoctrine of
  Election and Predestination
• The Declaration of Independencelife, liberty,
  and the pursuit of happiness
• American Revolutionary Warpromise of land
  ownership and investment
• Industrial Revolutionpossibility of anyone
  achieving wealth the nouveau riche
• Westward expansion and the Gold Rush

16

• Near the 20th century, major industrialist
  personalities became the new model of the
  American Dream, many beginning life in the
  humblest of conditions, but later controlling
  enormous corporations and fortunes. Perhaps the
  most notable were the great American capitalists
  Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. This
  acquisition of wealth demonstrated to many that
  if you had talent, intelligence, and a
  willingness to work hard, you were likely to be a
  success as a result.

17
Literary Terms

• Characterization
• Narrative Structure/Point of view
• Setting / Mood
• Symbolism
• Theme

18
Modernism

• The term modernism refers to the radical shift in
  artistic sensibilities that took place in the
  post-World War One (1914-1918) period.
• Modernists presented a profoundly pessimistic
  picture of a culture in disarray.

19
Modernism

• In addition to emphasizing modern themes,
  Fitzgerald employs some techniques of modernist
  writing
• Unreliable Narrator Narrator as filter
• One Narrator, Multiple Narratives Story within
  the story
• Fitzgeralds technique reflects the modernists
  concern with with the way the mind processes or
  projects a reality which surrounds the individual
  but which is often alienating and oppressing.

20
Sources

• www.bookteacher.org (Thanks, Platt!)
• Lathbury, Roger. American Modernism (1910-1945).
  New York Facts on File, 2006.
• Gay, Peter. Modernism The Lure of Heresy From
  Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. New York W.W.
  Norton Co., Inc., 2008.
• Novels for Students The Great Gatsby