Context

• Prohibition - banning alcohol
• Golden age of USA
• Capatalism booming
• Post War
• Organised Crime
• Civil war = Racism
• American Exploitation
• First Wave Feminism
• Eugenics = superior white race
• F.Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1897, Illinois before moving to NYC.

  He was born into a middle class, but rural, family.
• Similairly to GG, his hedonistic lifestyle in NYC included his movement from the East to the West of the US and his courting of an upper class woman (Zelda Fitzgerald.)
• First printing of the book was in 1925
• Fitzgerald earned less than 7000 dollars from his first two printings of the book.
• Fitzgerald coined the term 'Jazz Age'
• In the 1920s, Americans were enjoying the economic boom and a renewed sense of hope and possibility .

  But, TGG stresses the darker side of the roaring 20s, its undercurrents of corruption, the desperate, empty decade.
• Written whilst Fitzgerald was in the French Riveria: a wealthy location in France.
• His wife, Zelda, whom he met on base in 1919, refused to marry him unless he could support her.

  After the war, he returned to NYC to pursue fame and fortune, and one week after the publication of his first novel he married Zelda.

  The couple later fell into dept due to their frivalous lifestyle: leading Fitzgerald to fall into alchololism and Zelda mental illness.
• The novel takes place during the Roaring Twenties, where America was convinced anyone could rise to 'greatness' through either the bonds business (more aimed at the MC) or bootlegging (organised crime + the LC)
• Fitzgerald was inspired by the geographic and social strata division between the new and old money he experienced himself when he moved to NYC in 1922 (three years before he wrote the book) and aimed to show wider America this corruption
• Gatsby meets Daisy when he is a young military officer during WWI, at Camp Taylor in Louisville where Fitzgerald was stationed in the army.
• 'beautiful little fool' is a line spoken by Fitzgerald's wife Zelda
• The Lost Generation = broadly, it refers to those who reached adulthood during WWI and therefore felt disillusionment in American society as they struggled to fit into post-war society.
• FG = a lost generation writer in his modernist writing, reflecting the situation and the lives that he lived
• Fitzgerald coined the 1920s as the 'Jazz Age' where Americans were prepared to do anything, to be anyplace just to become rich and live a lavish lifestyle.
• Whilst Gatsby is presented as solid against alcohol, Fitzgerald was a substantial alcoholic: which could allow G to be non-alcohol.
• Fitzgerald wrote the novel with the intention of writing the great american novel.