F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and the Roaring Twenties

1920-1929: Changing TimesThe 1920’s were a time of unprecedented change in the areas of

• Literature• Technology• Prohibition• Music• Women’s Rights • Lifestyles

An economy stimulated by WWI fueled a massive

economic boom.

General Business Conditions• Stable prices• High

employment• Prime interest

rate averagedless than 5%

• Stock yield higher than bond yield

Income Distribution

• 1922: Top 1% held 32% of nation’s wealth.

• 1929: Top 1% held 39% of nation’s wealth.

• “The rich get richer and the poor get…children.”

The Roaring 20’s

The decade of the twenties is often referred to as the “Jazz Age.” The term has as much to do with the jazzy atmosphere of the times as with the music!

Jazzy Sounds

• Prohibition brought many jazz musicians from New Orleans and Chicago to New York.

• Joe “King” Oliver was one of the best.

• Jazz became the soundtrack of rebellion for a younger generation.

Jazzy Duds

• Flappers were typically young girls of the twenties, usually with bobbed hair, short skirts, rolled stockings, and powdered knees.

• They danced the night away, doing the Charleston and the Rock Bottom.

Twenties Slang

• All Wet—wrong• Bee’s Knees—superb

person• Big Cheese—

important person• Bump Off—to murder• Dumb Dora—stupid

girl• Flat Tire—dull, boring

person• Gam—a girl’s leg• Hooch—bootleg liquor• Hoofer—chorus girl• Torpedo—hired

gunman

Gee I wish a torpedo

would bump off this flat

tire!Dumb Dora…

Lifestyle and Fashion of the 1920’s

• No more Victorian values

• Flappers• Collegiate

students• Independent

women• Increasing wealth• Social mobility

Women’s Rights Movement

• 1920—19th Amendment—Right to vote

• Suffrage—the right to vote

• Jordan Baker—character in the novel who reflects the changing woman

Prohibition• 18th Amendment• Volstead Act• Bootleggers

• Sold, bought, and consumed alcohol

• Speakeasies• Gangsters

Media and Technology

• Automobile—available to many

• Mass Media• Magazines

• Time Magazine• Reader’s Digest

• Radios and Advertising

• Movies—”Talkies”

• The Jazz Singer

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Descendent from “prominent” American stock.

• Attended Princeton but left without graduating.

• (Just) missed WWI• Met Zelda, but couldn’t afford to

marry her.• Published This Side of Paradise in

1920 at the age of 24; instant stardom.

• Married Zelda, his “golden girl.”• Wrote “money making” fiction for

most of his life.• He and Zelda were associated with

the high living of the golden age.

Fitzgerald (cont.)

• The Fitzgeralds had a daughter named Scotty.• Wrote The Great Gatsby in Europe in 1924-25.• Zelda had an affair and Gatsby was poorly

received.• Fitzgerald fought his reputation of being a drunk.• Zelda became mentally unstable.• Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a

screenwriter; he dies almost forgotten at age 45.• Zelda died in a mental hospital fire in 1948. • Fitzgerald didn’t become a literary “great” until

the 1960’s.

Literature of the 1920’s

• Author’s wrote about their personal lives as something “knowable.”

• Gatsby contains agreat deal of auto-biographical material.

• Fitzgerald wasinfluenced by the modern movement in art.

Modernism in the 1920’s

The Modernist Era

• Rejection of Romanticism and the advent of moral uncertainty (WWI).

• Embracing the “new” and industrialization

• Using new means of representation.

Modernism and Romanticism

Nick Carraway Gatsby

Fitzgerald and Modernism

• Modernists mistrusted the possibility of absolute truth.

• In modernist literature, loose ends were embraced rather than resolved clearly. What does this suggest about the “truth”?