Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby

Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby AP English 11- Ms. Schaudel

Introduction • Understanding the time period of a novel helps the reader understand the novel. • To which of your vocabulary terms does this idea refer?

World War I • World War I ended in 1918. • Disillusioned because of the war, the generation that fought and survived has come to be called “the lost generation.”

World War I • The total number of casualties in World War I, both military and civilian, was about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded.

Question • Why would World War I have caused so many people to become disillusioned? • Turn to a partner and share you answer for 30 seconds. • I will call on people randomly to share their responses.

F. Scott Fitzgerald • Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) • Born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24, 1896. • His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had charm and elegance but little money. • His mother, Mollie McQuillen Fitzgerald, was an Irish immigrant. Her family was financially secure, but she did not prefer society life. • The Fitzgeralds lived on the outskirts of a wealthy neighborhood, and although Scott played with the rich children, he was never totally accepted by them. • The family moved to New York in search of work. When Scott was about 12 years old, they moved back to St. Paul.

F. Scott Fitzgerald • In 1908, Scott entered St. Paul Academy where he excelled in debate and athletics. • During this time, he published some articles and three stories. Over the next ten years, Fitzgerald experienced several literary achievements, but also experienced academic decline. • He joined the Navy and was stationed at Camp Sheridan. • In 1918, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre. Zelda refused to marry Scott because he did not have the means to finance the kind of lifestyle she was used to. She waited for a short time, but eventually broke off their engagement.

F. Scott Fitzgerald • In 1919, Fitzgerald returned home to Minnesota. He wrote and published This Side of Paradise, in 1920. • One week after the novel’s release, Fitzgerald and Zelda were married in New York. • One year later, Zelda gave birth to their only daughter. The family lived an extravagant lifestyle that included much drinking and many parties. Their domestic life was turbulent, largely due to the couple’s heavy alcohol consumption, bordering on alcoholism. They spent their time in America and Europe. • The monies from the sale of This Side of Paradise began to run out so Scott wrote and sold short stories. In 1925, Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, his most famous work.

F. Scott Fitzgerald • In 1930, Zelda experienced the first of three mental breakdowns. After her breakdown in 1934, she remained institutionalized for the remainder of her life, draining what funds the Fitzgeralds did have. • Fitzgerald remained married to Zelda until his death, but he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. She helped revive Fitzgerald’s writing career and spent the last few years of his life with him. • In 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald died. He had virtually slipped into literary oblivion. The obituaries written about him were condescending and focused on many of his hardships. Friends were nowhere to be found.

The Roaring Twenties • While the sense of loss was readily apparent among expatriate American artists who remained in Europe after the war, back home the disillusionment took a less obvious form. • America seemed to throw itself headlong into a decade of madcap behavior and materialism, a decade that has come to be called the Roaring Twenties.

The Jazz Age • The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the music called jazz, promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio, swept up from New Orleans to capture the national imagination. • Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at the rules of the past.

Consumerism • mass-production and chain stores drove down prices and encouraged consumers to spend • the concept of credit was being used to help more Americans buy durable goods such as cars and stoves. The lenders, of course, charged interest so that the total cost of the item was far more in the end than if it had been purchased for cash. • runaway consumer credit was part of the overload that resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s. • Americans were also spending more money on entertainment, especially the movies.

Economic Policies • Urbanization reached a climax in the 1920s. For the first time, more Americans and Canadians lived in cities of 2500 or more people than in small towns or rural areas. • However the nation was fascinated with its great metropolitan centers that contained about 15% of the population. • New York and Chicago vied in building skyscrapers, and New York pulled ahead with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. • The finance and insurance industries doubled and tripled in size. • The basic pattern of the modern white collar job was set during the late 19th century, but it now became the norm for life in large and medium cities. • Typewriters, filing cabinets and telephones brought unmarried women into clerical jobs.

The New Woman • Among the rules broken were the age-old conventions guiding the behavior of women. The new woman demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home. • Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish “bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of the fashionable twenties “flapper.”

Prohibition • Another rule often broken was the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, or Prohibition, which banned the public sale of alcoholic beverages from 1919 until its appeal in 1933. • Speak-easies, nightclubs, and taverns that sold liquor were often raided, and gangsters made illegal fortunes as bootleggers, smuggling alcohol into America from abroad.

Gambling • Another gangland activity was illegal gambling. • Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseball’s World Series.

The Automobile • The Jazz Age was also an era of reckless spending and consumption, and the most conspicuous status symbol of the time was a flashy new automobile. • Advertising was becoming the major industry that it is today, and soon advertisers took advantage of new roadways by setting up huge billboards at their sides. • Both the automobile and a bizarre billboard play important roles in The Great Gatsby.

The Novel in Context • In your vocabulary notebook, write an entry for context. Discuss the context in which The Great Gatsby was written. • Finish your Cornell Notes and turn them in tomorrow. Focus on extracting the main points and also summarizing the information well.

End It’s time for you to decide, Old Sport…

Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby