The great gatsby biography

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Salisbury, Maryland: — Additionally, Fitzgerald was plagued by alcoholism, which had a profound impact on his health and creative output. By the s, Fitzgerald's literary career was in decline, and he struggled to maintain his lifestyle and support his family. He turned to writing screenplays and short stories for Hollywood studios, but his work was often unappreciated and poorly compensated.

Fitzgerald's final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was left unfinished at the time of his death in at the age of Fitzgerald's legacy as one of the most important writers of the 20th century is secure. His works are celebrated for their elegant prose, vivid characterizations, and acute social commentary. Fitzgerald's life, too, has become the stuff of legend, as he embodied the spirit of the Jazz Age while also grappling with the darker aspects of fame and fortune.

William Shakespeare. Scott Fitzgerald? Death Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, , at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel 'The Great Gatsby. Although 'The Great Gatsby' was well-received when it was published, it was long after Fitzgerald's death that it was regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

Scott Fitzgerald Biography Author: Biography. In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire. Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty. I never at any one time saw [Gatsby] clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind. Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy. There are no second acts in American lives.

Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium. Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it.

Watch Next. On the other hand, Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler, is seen in a restaurant hidden in a dark cellar when Gatsby first introduces him to Nick. Victorious, America experienced an economic boom and expansion. Politically, the country made major advances in the area of women's independence. During the war, women had enjoyed economic independence by taking over jobs for the men who fought overseas.

After the war, they pursued financial independence and a freer lifestyle. This was the time of the "flappers," young women who dressed up in jewelry and feather boas, wore bobbed hairdos, and danced the Charleston. Zelda Fitzgerald and her cronies, including Sara Murphy, exemplified the ultimate flapper look. In The Great Gatsby , Jordan Baker is an athletic, independent woman, who maintains a hardened, amoral view of life.

Her character represents the new breed of woman in America with a sense of power during this time. As a reaction against the fads and liberalism that emerged in the big cities after the war, the U. Government and conservative elements in the country advocated and imposed legislation restricting the manufacture and distribution of liquor. Its organizers, the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, National Prohibition Party, and others, viewed alcohol as a dangerous drug that disrupted lives and families.

They felt it the duty of the government to relieve the temptation of alcohol by banning it altogether. In January, , the U. Congress ratified the 18th Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" on a national level. Nine months later, the Volstead Act passed, proving the enforcement means for such measures.

Prohibition, however, had little effect on the hedonism of the liquor-loving public, and speakeasies, a type of illegal bar, cropped up everywhere. One Fitzgerald critic, Andre Le Vot, wrote: "The bootlegger entered American folklore with as much public complicity as the outlaws of the Old West had enjoyed. Prohibition fostered a large underworld industry in many big cities, including Chicago and New York.

For years, New York was under the control of the Irish politicians of Tammany Hall, which assured that corruption persisted. Bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling thrived, while police took money from shady operators engaged in these activities and overlooked the illegalities. Through his campaign contributions to the politicians, he was entitled to a monopoly of prostitution and gambling in New York until he was murdered in Wolfsheim says that "The old Metropole….

I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. When the head of police, Charles Becker, tried to receive some of Rosenthal's payouts, Rosenthal complained to a reporter. This act exposed the entire corruption of Tammany Hall and the New York police force. Two days later, Becker's men murdered Rosenthal on the steps of the Metropole.

Becker and four of his men went to the electric chair for their part in the crime. The World Series was the focus of a scandal that sent shock waves around the sports world. Due to low game attendance during World War I, players' salaries were cut back. In defiance, the White Sox threatened to strike against their owner, Charles Comiskey, who had refused to pay them a higher salary.

The team's first baseman, Arnold "Chick" Gandil, approached a bookmaker and gambler, Joseph Sullivan, with an offer to intentionally lose the series. Eight players, including left fielder Shoeless Joe Jackson , participated in the scam. With the help of Arnold Rothstein, Sullivan raised the money to pay the players, and began placing bets that the White Sox would lose.

The Sox proceeded to suffer one of the greatest sports upsets in history, and lost three games to five. When the scandal was exposed, due to a number of civil cases involving financial losses on the part of those who betted for the Sox, the eight players were banned from baseball for life and branded the "Black Sox. He takes mysterious phone calls and steps aside for private, undisclosed conversations.

It was said that "one time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Today: The neo-Nazi and white "skinhead" supremist movements have taken hold in parts of the U. A bombing suspect in the Oklahoma City federal building explosion, which killed over people, expresses his anger at the FBI's mishandling of a standoff with a separatist group at Waco, Texas, in which the compound burned and many people were killed.

Al Capone takes over as boss of Chicago bootlegging from racketeer Johnny Torrio, who retires after sustaining gunshot wounds. Today: The use and abuse of alcohol grows in the U. Though still powerful in the drug and prostitution business, several Mafia dons, including John Gotti, are imprisoned for life. Today: While direct bribery of politicians and police is neither open nor widespread, there are still political scandals regarding funding of political campaigns.

Members of both Democratic and Republican parties have been accused of taking illegal contributions, and campaign finance reform is a hot political issue. Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins, commissioned a full-color, illustrated jacket design from the Spanish artist Francis Cugat. Cugat had worked previously on movie poster and sets and was employed as a designer in Hollywood.

The Art Deco piece that he produced for the novel shows the outlined eyes of a woman looking out of a midnight blue sky above the carnival lights of Coney Island in Manhattan. The piece was completed seven months before the novel, and Fitzgerald may have used it to inspire his own imagery. He calls Daisy the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the ark cornices and blinding signs" of New York.

Just before The Great Gatsby was to appear—with a publication date of April 10, —the Fitzgeralds were in the south of France. Fitzgerald was waiting for news from Max Perkins, his publisher, and cabled him to request "Any News. He was earnest about being considered one of the top American writers of his time, and needed the boost that his third novel might give him to achieve that status.

During his lifetime, Fitzgerald was generally praised for The Great Gatsby; it is usually considered to be his finest accomplishment and the one most analyzed by literary critics. The established opinion, according to biographer Arthur Mizener in The Far Side of Paradise , is best represented by renowned critic Lionel Trilling: "Except once, Fitzgerald did not fully realize his powers….

But [his] quality was a great one and on one occasion, in The Great Gatsby , it was as finely crystallized in art as it deserved to be. Mencken praised the writer, as quoted by Mizener. Said the notoriously abrasive Mencken in a letter to the author: "I think it is incomparably the best piece of work you have done. Altogether I think it's the best thing you've done since Paradise.

His friend, Edmund Wilson , called it "the best thing you have done—the best planned, the best sustained, the best written. From an artistic perspective, Fitzgerald's third novel was as close to a triumph as he would ever get. By February, a few more books were sold and then sales leveled out. The summer of for Fitzgerald was one of " parties and no work.

For the rest of his life, nothing he wrote quite measured up to Gatsby. In fact, when he walked into a book shop in Los Angeles and requested one of his books, he discovered they were out of print. In the early s, Fitzgerald's works began to enjoy a revival; in addition to Gatsby, Tender Is the Night , with its psychological bent, appealed to readers.

Joseph N. Riddel and James Tuttleton analyzed American-born novelist Henry James's impact on Fitzgerald, since both men wrote about the manners of a particular culture. Gatsby was compared to T. Symbolism in Gatsby focuses on Dr. Eckleburg's eyes, the Wasteland motif, and the color symbolism. Gatsby has ironically been likened to Christ, and Nick Carraway, the storyteller, to Nicodemus, in a Christian interpretation of the novel.

Relatively speaking, most of Fitzgerald's short stories have been sorely neglected by critics, though a steady stream of critical comment appears every year. It has been difficult for critics to detach Fitzgerald the writer from Fitzgerald the legend. Sociological, historical, and biographical approaches to teaching literature have predominated in past decades.

Now, more attention is being given to a close reading of Gatsby for its artistry. In the following essay, Hermanson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, examines the roles of the major characters in The Great Gatsby and how the novel both depicts its own time and deals with timeless issues of ambiguity and tragedy. Published in , The Great Gatsby became an immediate classic and propelled its young author to a fame he never again equalled.

The novel captured the spirit of the "Jazz Age," a post-World War I era in upper-class America that Fitzgerald himself gave this name to, and the flamboyance of the author and his wife Zelda as they moved about Europe with other American expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway. However, Gatsby expresses more than the exuberance of the times.

It depicts the restlessness of what Gertrude Stein another expatriate modernist writer called a "lost generation. Eliot's landmark poem "The Wasteland" , then, Gatsby also has its own "valley of ashes" or wasteland where men move about obscurely in the dust, and this imagery of decay, death, and corruption pervades the novel and "infects" the story and its hero too.

Because the novel is not just about one man, James Gatz or Jay Gatsby, but about aspects of the human condition of an era, and themes that transcend time altogether, it is the stuff of myth. Gatsby's attempts to attain an ideal of himself and then to put this ideal to the service of another ideal, romantic love, are attempts to rise above corruption in all its forms.

It is this quality in him that Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator, attempts to portray, and in so doing the novel, like its hero, attains a form of enduring greatness. The novel is narrated in retrospect; Nick is writing the account two years after the events of the summer he describes, and this introduces a critical distance and perspective which is conveyed through occasional comments about the story he is telling and how it must appear to a reader.

The time scheme of the novel is further complicated as "the history of that summer" of contains within it the story of another summer, five years before this one, when Gatsby and Daisy first courted. This is the story that Jordan tells Nick. As that earlier summer ended with Gatsby's departure for the war in the fall, so the summer of Nick's experience of the East ends with the crisis on the last hot day the day of mint juleps in the hotel and Myrtle Wilson's death and is followed by Gatsby's murder by George Wilson on the first day of fall.

This seasonal calendar is more than just a parallel, however. It is a metaphor for the blooming and blasting of love and of hope, like the flowers so often mentioned. Similarly, the novel's elaborate use of light and dark imagery light, darkness, sunshine, and shadow, and the in-between changes of twilight symbolizes emotional states as well.

While this can describe Daisy's change between her affair with Gatsby and the couples' reunion, it may also characterize the general sense of restlessness and profound changes happening in these first years after World War One. Daisy the dayseye, or the sun is dressed in white and is associated with light and sunshine throughout the novel, and she is very much a seasonal creature.

It is impossible, then, for Gatsby to catch this light and fix it in one place or one time. Daisy's constant quality is like the light in the novel, she is always changing. Gatsby's own devotion to her has a permanence that Daisy cannot live up to, yet Gatsby seems committed to an idea of Daisy that he has created rather than to the real woman she is.

Daisy's changeability is not at fault in Gatsby's failure. Although she is careless in the way that people like Tom are careless in their wealth and treatment of other people, Daisy is naturally not able to renounce time itself in the way Gatsby does in order to meet him again in the past. Gatsby is gorgeous and creates a sense of wonder in Nick for the daring nature of his impossible but incorruptible dream.

It is the attempt itself and the firm belief that he can achieve the impossible that makes Gatsby more than the sum of his somewhat shabby reality. As a seventeen-year-old he transformed himself from plain James Gatz, to Jay Gatsby for whom anything is possible. As he rowed out to Dan Cody's sumptuous yacht off the shore of Lake Superior, he was crossing towards opportunity, and a Platonic conception of himself based on the Greek philosopher Platos' theory of perfect forms, which interprets everything on earth as a better or worse copy of these forms, as well as the conception of a new self-identity.

Gatsby conforms to an ideal of himself that transforms reality into possibility. This audacity and disregard for ties binding him to his own past is his apprenticeship for loving Daisy. In defiance of the class difference separating them, he aspires high to this girl in a golden tower, the "king's" daughter, whose voice is full of money. Gatsby does not seem to realize that his idea of Daisy, whom he weds with a kiss one summer night has as little bearing on reality as Jay Gatsby does.

Gatsby is a romantic, but he is also made up of romantic stories by other people who speculate and rumor about his unknown past. Nick takes it upon himself to tell the story and thus to tell Gatsby's story as he pieced it together from different sources, and Nick characterizes himself as someone who understands Gatsby better, who wants to set the record straight, and who sides with Gatsby against the world that made him up and then deserted him.

It is Nick alone who arranges Gatsby's funeral and meets with his father, and the bitterness of the lesson about humanity that Nick learns from this experience affects the way he tells the story. Certainly, Nick is also romanticizing Gatsby. He contrasts the wondrous hope which Gatsby embodied against the corruptness of his bootlegging business Gatsby's fortune in fact came from illegal alcohol sales and against the more corrupt society which preyed on Gatsby.

Against the background of the times and of upper-class society like that represented at his parties, Gatsby's extraordinary gift for hope and his romantic readiness stand out as transcendent. Nick's own role in the novel shares much of the nature of paradox and ambiguity which characterizes the whole. The novel is as much about Nick as it is about Gatsby and his colossal dream of Daisy.

Nick is an involved outsider, privileged or burdened with the role of witness and recorder of events. While he protests often of his unwillingness to participate in other's embroilments and is frequently irritated or exasperated by them, he participates nevertheless. He is implicated in Tom's relationship with Myrtle by virtue of his presence with them and the uncomfortable period he spends in the living room of the lovers' apartment while they are in the bedroom together implicates him further as a passive accomplice while he retains his sense of distance through moral superiority.

Similarly, Nick performs the service of go-between or pander for Gatsby and Daisy; the couple reunite in his house, and he invites Daisy there for this purpose. At Gatsby's party he acts as lookout, keeping a watchful eye for Tom while the couple slip over to sit on Nick's own porch. This ambivalence in his character undermines his statements about himself as being one of the few honest people that he has ever known, and has led to many critics considering him a kind of smug voyeur.

However, Nick's own sense of being both enchanted and repelled by his experiences is at the source of the novel's larger depiction of a meretricious society both enchanting and repelling, and it is this quality which enables Nick to find Gatsby both the representative of everything for which he has an unaffected scorn, and at the same time the embodiment of gorgeous hope.

In this way, a story often marked by sordid dealings and dismissed by Nick in one breath writing two years later as the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men can also be a holocaust or fully developed tragedy. In considering the novel as tragedy, the role of fate or fortune in its other sense figures large. The novel is conspicuous in its lack of a religious belief system; God is absent from the skies over East and West Egg.

Part of the restlessness of a postwar generation may describe the quest for a belief that can fill the void created by this loss, or the results of a hedonistic lifestyle that will distract people from it altogether. Nick clings to his declared preference for honesty and being a careful driver in a world of metaphorically careless drivers. Daisy is one who lives for the moment, and for whom glimpses of tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that are terrifying lapses of a willful blindness to such matters and blindness is one of the novel's themes.

Gatsby has his own willful blindness in the form of his enduring ideals and the dreams these ideals have created. In classical mythology, which the novel draws on heavily, the goddess Fortune is also blind in that she favors no one she is often figured with one eye open and one eye closed, winking like Daisy herself as she turns her wheel about, thereby deciding the fates of human beings.

One question of the novel, then, is who or what is at the wheel? The blind eyes that watch over the world of the novel are those of Dr. Eckleburg on an old billboard in the valley of ashes. After Myrtle's death, her husband George is looking at these when he says God sees everything. Nothing seems able to intervene in Gatsby's own inexorable fate, as Wilson tracks him down to murder him in the mistaken belief that Gatsby was driving the death car that killed Myrtle.

This sense of predetermined destiny contributes to the novel as tragedy. For all characters, the relationship between the past and the future is at issue, as well as personal responsibility for the choices they make in navigating the present between these. Nick appears to believe that being careful will keep him out of harm, but he is more of a careless driver than he realizes, as Jordan comments to him after Gatsby's death and after their affair is over.

Gatsby himself recalls another careless driver. In Greek mythology Phaeton tried to harness his chariot to the sun and suffered for his presumption. Similarly, Gatsby tries with his yellow car and all that it symbolizes to catch Daisy, and fails just as surely.

The great gatsby biography

The many echoes of classical mythology recall to the novel a much more distant past and a mythical kind of narrative in order to make sense of the New World of America. The novel ends by uniting Gatsby's dream born from his past with the American dream from another past, a dream that is as incorruptible and unreal, indicating the way in which the future of this story may be found in the past: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

In the following excerpt, Samuels describes Fitzgerald's two great achievements in The Great Gatsby: the "triumph of language" and his creation of the book's narrator, Nick Carraway. I do not speak merely of the "flowers," the famous passages: Nick's description of Gatsby yearning toward the green light on Daisy's dock, Gatsby's remark that the Buchanans' love is "only personal," the book's last page.

Throughout, The Great Gatsby has the precision and splendor of a lyric poem, yet well-wrought prose is merely one of its triumphs. Fitzgerald's distinction in this novel is to have made language celebrate itself. Among other things, The Great Gatsby is about the power of art. This celebration of literary art is inseparable from the novel's second great achievement—its management of point of view, the creation of Nick.

With his persona, Fitzgerald obtained more than objectivity and concentration of effect.