The Great Gatsby  F。Scott。Fitzgerald
Context
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key， the author of The Star-Spangled Banner。 Fitzgerald was raised in St。 Paul， Minnesota. Though an intelligent child， he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated， instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.姚星彤老公
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant， and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery， Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth， fun， and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success。 With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920， Fitzgerald became a liter
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ary sensation， earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him。
天涯 娱乐八卦Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925。 Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school （in Nick's case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby， a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South.
Having become a celebrity， Fitzgerald fell into a wild， reckless life—style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money。 Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression， however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing。 He published Tender Is the Night in 193
4, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle。 In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays， and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon， died of a heart attack at the age of forty—four.
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age。” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period， in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation。 Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution （1919）， made millionaires out of bootleggers， and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice， and “speakeasies”-secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock， and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate。 The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear， as money， opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day。
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby， Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich。 Now he found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society， particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick， Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center。 In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald's attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby， Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.
Plot Overview
Nick Carraway， a young man from Minnesota， moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island， a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are pron陆川前妻
e to garish displays of wealth. Nick’s next—door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.
止战之殇mvNick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class. Nick drives out to East Egg one evening for dinner with his cousin， Daisy Buchanan， and her husband, Tom， an erstwhile classmate of Nick’s at Yale. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful， cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship。 Nick also learns a bit about Daisy and Tom’s marriage: Jordan tells him that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes， a gray industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City。 Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair， Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy， and Tom responds by breaking her nose。