The Great Gatsby

1. The Great Gatsby F.Scott Fitzgerald

2. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald • Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family. • Named after a distant Francis Scott Key (Star Spangled Banner). • His father worked as a wicker furniture salesman. When the business failed he worked for Proctor and Gamble. • Fitzgerald lived a privileged life. His mother’s family made a fortune in the grocery business. • He went to private Catholic schools and was described as a boy of unusual intelligence with a keen interest in literature.

3. Life continued… • Fitzgerald went to Princeton where he wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Nassau Lit, and the Princeton Tiger. • His dedication to writing came at the expense of his grades and coursework. He dropped out of Princeton and joined the Army. • He wrote his first novel The Romantic Egotist before reporting for duty. He feared he would die in war before achieving his dream of writing a novel. • He was assigned to an Army camp near Montgomery, Alabama. It was there in a local club that he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Justice.

4. Life continued.. • After being discharged from the Army, he moved to New York and began working for Barron Collier, and advertising agency. • He wrote This Side of Paradise, a semi-autobiographical account of his time at Princeton. This was a revision of The Romantic Egotist. It was published in March of 1920 and was an instant success! • He married Zelda at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that same year. • One year later, Frances Scott “Scottie” was born. She was their only child. • Sadly, Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died in a fire that burned the hospital she was living in. • F.S. Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44 from a massive heart attack.

5. The Jazz Age /Roaring 20s • The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles (Charleston) rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. • The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. • American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with coining the term, first using it in the title of his 1922 short story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age.[1] • Advances such automobiles, moving pictures, and radio, brought "modernity" to a large part of the population.

6. The Great Gatsby • Characters • Nick Carraway - The novel’s narrator, Nick is a young man from Minnesota who, after being educated at Yale and fighting in World War I, goes to New York City to learn the bond business. Honest, tolerant, and inclined to reserve judgment, Nick often serves as a confidant for those with troubling secrets. • Jay Gatsby - The title character and protagonist of the novel, Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy young man living in a Gothic mansion in West Egg. He is famous for the lavish parties he throws every Saturday night, but no one knows where he comes from, what he does, or how he made his fortune.

7. Characters Continued… • Daisy Buchanan - Nick’s cousin, and the woman Gatsby loves. Daisy was courted by a number of war officers, including Gatsby. She fell in love with Gatsby and promised to wait for him. She didn’t’ wait. She married Tom Buchanan. Now a beautiful socialite, Daisy lives with Tom across from Gatsby in the fashionable East Egg district of Long Island. She is sardonic and somewhat cynical, and behaves superficially to mask her pain at her husband’s constant infidelity. • Tom Buchanan -  Daisy’s immensely wealthy husband, once a member of Nick’s social club at Yale. Powerfully built and hailing from a socially solid old family, Tom is an arrogant, hypocritical bully.

8. Characters Continued… Character Map • Jordan Baker - Daisy’s friend, a woman with whom Nick becomes romantically involved during the course of the novel. A competitive golfer, Jordan represents one of the “new women” of the 1920s, • Myrtle Wilson - Tom’s lover, whose lifeless husband George owns a run-down garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle herself possesses a fierce vitality and desperately looks for a way to improve her situation • George Wilson - Myrtle’s husband, the lifeless, exhausted owner of a run-down auto shop at the edge of the valley of ashes. George loves and idealizes Myrtle, and is devastated by her affair with Tom.

9. Characters Continued… T. J. Echleburg • Owl Eyes - The eccentric, bespectacled drunk whom Nick meets at the first party he attends at Gatsby’s mansion. Nick finds Owl Eyes looking through Gatsby’s library, astonished that the books are real. • Klipspringer - The shallow freeloader who seems almost to live at Gatsby’s mansion, taking advantage of his host’s money. • Meyer Wolfsheim - Gatsby’s friend, a prominent figure in organized crime. Before the events of the novel take place, Wolfsheim helped Gatsby to make his fortune bootlegging illegal liquor.

10. Setting Gatsby Map • Great Gatsby is set in New York City and on Long Island, in two areas known as "West Egg" and "East Egg"—in real life, Great Neck and Port Washington peninsulas on Long Island. Long Island's beach communities really were (and still are) home to the rich and fabulous of the New York City area, and Fitzgerald actually lived in a small house in West Egg. • Valley of the Ashes- where Myrtle and George Wilson have a run-down garage. This corridor between New York and the suburbs encompasses the full range of social class. Whereas the valley of ashes is a place of evident poverty, both the city and the two suburbs represent bastions of affluence.

11. Symbols

12. Themes in The Great Gatsby

13. Video slide The Great Gatsbu Trailer