Angelique Arrizon
American Lit. 11
Period 3
Fitzgerald’s life and its connection to The Great Gatsby
During the Jazz Age in 1925, The Great Gatsby was written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. It was a novel that served as a portrait of the frenzied post- WWI society. It was a novel noted for its remarkable way in which the author captured a cross section of American society. Reflecting mostly on the way Fitzgerald lived, the characters in Gatsby live in a time of corruption. Tom Buchanan’s infidelity, Nick Caraway’s fascination with the lifestyle of wealth, and Jay Gatsby’s idealism of riches are all a reflection of the lifestyle that the author, F. S. F. and his wife Zelda led in the roaring 20’s.
Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda had had marital problems as well as Tom and Daisy Buchanan did. Like Tom, Fitzgerald had a mistress. Tom insisted that he “[wanted Nick] to meet [his] girl,” he did not care about how uncomfortable it would make Nick to meet the woman he was fooling around with (p 28). Tom and Daisy moved around multiple times similarly to Fitzgerald and his wife. Both couples lived in Chicago, but an incident caused the Buchanans to move up Northeast to New York. “They were careless people Tom and Daisy” just like Zelda and Scott, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and left other people to clean up the mess they had made.” (p 179) Always running from their problems, Tom and Daisy did not like facing the music. Along with Scott and Zelda, Tom and Daisy “had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there…” (p 10) The money that these two couples had caused them to be self-centered, out and about.
Nick felt that modern people on the east coast had completely lost their values chasing after money. Nick felt that