The Great Gatsby

A detailed Summary of The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24 September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota in the Mid-

West of America. At the time of his birth America was changing into a country of growing cities and technological changes were happening. He was educated at Princeton University but he was a very poor student and never finished his degree.

At University he was with many young men from wealthy backgrounds. The newly-rich commercial classes of America preferred to send their children to East Coast Universities. Although his family wasn't poor, in the company of such men he felt poor and he was influenced by the rich for the rest of his life. The reason he was such a bad student was because of his interest in literature. He read and wrote very much at the University and had little time left for studying.

After leaving University he joined the Army but although America had joined the First World War he never fought in Europe. While in the army he met Zelda Sayre and they got engaged. After he left the army he worked as an advertising agent and tried to get his first novel published. The novel was rejected and Zelda broke off their engagement too because she felt she couldn't live with a man with such a small income. So Fitzgerald quit

his job and revised his novel. It was published and within a week Zelda and Fitzgerald were married. America was in, what was called, "The Jazz Age" and it was a time of great social change. The moral behaviour of people was changing rapidly. Fitzgerald has come to be seen as a sort of social historian because his first three novels ( including " The Great Gatsby") reflected the new shocking behaviour of young (mostly wealthy) Americans.

Jay Gatsby's real name was James Gatz and his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people from North Dakota. He changed his name when he was seventeen and at that exact same age he invented his new self according to a model that would make a seventeen-year-old boy proud. He worked as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher along the south shore of Lake Superior. "He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted". But all these women weren't what you'd call "nice" girls. "His heart was in a constant and turbulent riot" and he had "the most grotesque and fantastic conceits" at night. He dreamed and fantasized and "for a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the reality of unreality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing". Afterwards he worked as a janitor at a small Lutheran college of St. Olaf's in southern Minnesota but soon he returned to Lake Superior again. He then met Dan Cody, a millionaire who liked him because he was "quick and extravagantly ambitious". Cody bought Gatsby some new clothes and took him with him on his yacht the Tuolomee. For five years he was employed in a vague personal capacity being in turn a steward, mate, skipper, secretary and even jailor. During this time the boat went three times around the Continent. After five years however Dan Cody died. "It was indirectly due to him that Gatsby drank so little" for he had seen what happened to people who drank. He inherited 25 000 dollars from Cody but he never got the money and all he was left with was "his singularly appropriate education". And then he met Daisy who was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. At first he found her excitingly desirable with her beautiful house and her casual manner towards it as though it were the most natural thing in the world to live in such a place. "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy - it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions". He knew that he didn't belong in her world and made the most of his time taking what he could get, including Daisy. He gave Daisy the impression that he was "a person of much the same stratum as she and that he was fully able to take care of her". But it turned out differently from the way he had imagined it. Daisy was extraordinary and it was he who found he was breathless at the sight of her and in love with her. On the last afternoon before he went abroad he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long time and they had never been closer than at that moment. Gatsby did extremely well in the war, he was a captain before he went to the front and then he was promoted major and got the command of the divisional machine-guns. Afterwards he tried to get home but something went wrong and he went to Oxford instead where he stayed for five months. He was worried because there was "a quietly nervous despair in Daisy's letters". She was young and after a while she started going out with men again and suddenly she wanted her life shape

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2515
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People