The novel

• The Great Gatsby

  F. Scott Fitzgerald's third novel
• Fitzgerald: '"Best American novel ever written"'
• This Side of Paradise (1920)

  • Made a celebrity of Fitzgerald and he married Zelda Sayre in 1920 after the novel was published and was fairly successful
• Fitzgerald

  • Chronicler of an emergent rebellious postwar youth culture, and this was on display as Fitzgerald published popular short stories about this group in the Saturday Evening Post
  • Flamboyant writing style, formally quite messy
• Fitzgerald: '"I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned"'
• Fitzgerald: '"I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I've ever had in a way.. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not"'
• The Great Gatsby

  • Developed the usage of light motifs to build the novel - taken from modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein
  • Fundamentally trivial story, but the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. It is in protest against Fitzgerald's own formless two novels, and Lewis' and Dos Passos'
• Rejection from the early debutante Ginevra King - whom Daisy Buchanan is based on


  Fuelled Fitzgerald's need to prove to the contemporary society that he understands this period of time and should be accepted in the upper class society
• Fitzgerald always felt like a poor boy in a Rich boy school at Princeton
• Zelda may have had an affair with a Frenchman in the war
• "Gatsby Clusters"

  • Fitzgerald wrote for money between 1922 and 1924 when he wrote The Great Gatsby and 1925 when it was published, often commenting on romantic disillusionment
• Absolution (1923)


  Young catholic boy who struggles against his pious Midwestern father, immigrant father as well
• The Great Gatsby was going to have a catholic element
• West Egg and East Egg

  Fictionalised renditions of Great Neck (WE) and Manhasset Neck (EE) on Long Island
• Perkins suggested some last minute changes to the novel

  Initially, Gatsby's past and how he earned his money was said to be revealed entirely in Chapter 8 in the first person, yet Perkins thought this undermined Fitzgerald's usage of the third person through Nick Carraway and his narration
• Fitzgerald broke up Gatsby's story across chapters; we learn vital information in Chapter 6 through Nick Carraway