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The Great Gatsby Failure

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote many works of literature including one of his best sellers, The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was considered to be the depiction of The Roaring Twenties, and one of the best American novels ever written. During this time, The Roaring Twenties doubled the nation's wealth, which allowed more people to be rich. This wealth caused a split between social classes. The ones who had their American Dream, and the ones who did not. With its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream, The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work (biography.com). Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September …show more content…

The impending failure had been clear to Fitzgerald by the time he finished Gatsby – and the fact that in 1925 most Americans were still recklessly chasing the dream had a great deal to do with the initial commercial and critical failure of The Great Gatsby, which would not be hailed as a masterpiece until the 50s, once hindsight had revealed its prophetic truth (Churchwell, …show more content…

In the succeeding years, Fitzgerald's slim tale of the jazz age became the most celebrated and beloved novel in the American canon. It's more than an American classic; it's become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the American dream. And yet all the attempts to adapt it to stage and screen have only served to illustrate its fragility and its flaws. Fitzgerald's prose somehow elevates a lurid and underdeveloped narrative to the level of myth (McInerney, Jay).
McInerney is trying to say that reading the novel can give you a much better understanding of the idea that Fitzgerald was originally trying to get across. This idea being the American Dream and the pursuit of that dream. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby to show how people acted during The Jazz Age, the thirst for the American Dream, love, and materialism. Fitzgerald shows the struggle people went through to try and fulfill their American Dream. Without this dream, people would not have worked as hard. This time period was ruled by the rich, and what material items they had. Fitzgerald expressed the way society acted perfectly through his different characters. Each character had their own version of their American Dream, and that is what captured so many people's

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