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F. Scott Fitzgerald & The Great Gatsby

© Audrey McCrone

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald once said, "I talk with the authority of failure: earnest, with the authority of success."

Born in September of 1896 in New York, Fitzgerald had two thematic quests present in his works: money, and perpetual youth and beauty. He's one both attracted and repulsed by wealth, fully aware of what money can do for a person, as well as to them.

His father's aristocratic family produced the writer of The Star-Spangled Banner, whom he was named after. His mother's Irish family endured the potato famine. In his youth, raised Roman Catholic in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was strikingly handsome. "I didn't have the two top things: great animal magnetism or money," he said. "I had the two second things, though: good looks and intelligence."

These comments really reflect his shallow values. He studied at Princeton and was successful for a time, especially at acting, but he left early without a degree. He went off to join the army, where he met Zelda Sayer, the daughter of an aristocratic southern judge.

Though they probably were in love, Zelda wouldn't marry him without money. Fitzgerald wanted to acheive his fame in New York, but returned to St. Paul to write This Side of Paradise, which became a best seller, and acheived him fame. Then, he and Zelda married.

The two spent the early 1920s living the high life and jet-setting. Once the Great Crash occurred (in 1924), there was no more wealth with which to be flamboyant, and by 1929 Zelda lost her sanity.

Although The Great Gatsby (1925) captured the essence of the Jazz Age in America, the Depression seemed to have occurred for Fitzgerald on every possible level. T.S. Eliot said of this novel that it was "the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James." Malcolm Cowley called it "the only American novel in which I would not change one word." It was enormously respected, but not popular at the time of publication, due to America's economic situation.

Nick Caraway is the observer and a participant in The Great Gatsby. In chapter one, we find he is privy to the information shared by all the characters, an honest and thoughtful confidant. Nick's character grows by revealing the corruption and shallowness surrounding Jay Gatsby (the emotional core of the book).

Gatsby represents the irrationality of romantic notion. He builds his wealth however he can to win love. This is his truly redemptive quality, where his materialism doesn't really matter and is only a means to gain the love of Daisy, an unhappily married woman. He puts on a gentlemanly facade that Daisy nearly falls for. It serves to build him up to be practically heroic, while even money cannot help him repeat the past.

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