The document provides historical context for F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby". It discusses the Jazz Age of the 1920s when the novel was set and influenced by, including the flapper culture, prohibition, and post-WWI economic boom. It also gives biographical details about Fitzgerald's life and similarities between events in his life and elements of the novel's plot and characters.

1. Historical Context of
the Novel: “The
Great Gatsby”

2. Roll No: 05
Enrolment Number: 4069206420220016
Sem: 2 [M.A.] Batch:
2022-2024
Paper Number: 106 Paper Code: 22399
Paper Name: The Twentieth century literature: 1900 to world war-
2
Submitted To: Smt S.B.Gardi, Department of English, M.K.B.U.
Dated On: 11-03-2023 E-Mail:
HELLO! I AM DRASHTI JOSHI

3. Introduction of
Author:
Historical context of
the novel:
Novel In
Nutshell:
Citation
01
02 03
04
Road Map of Presentation:
Thank you

4. Introduction of Author:
● Full Name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
● Nationality: American
● Ethnicity: Irish
● Birth Date: September 24, 1896
● Place of Birth: Saint Paul, Minnesota
● Death Date: December 21, 1940
● Place of Death: Hollywood, California
● Genre(s): Novels, Short Stories, Fiction
- He became a leading figure in the socially important Triangle Club, a dramatic
society, and was elected to one of the leading clubs of the university. He fell
in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties of her generation. Then he lost
Ginevra and flunked out of Princeton.
- With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a
literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to
marry him.

5. -Fitzgerald also shares some characteristics with The Great
Gatsby’s titular character, 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.
-After The Great Gatsby brought him literary celebrity,
Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless lifestyle of parties and
decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing
to earn money. 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. (Fitzgerald)
-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.
Continue...

7. Novel In Nutshell:
-The Great Gatsby is the most profoundly American novel of its time; at its conclusion, Fitzgerald
connects Gatsby’s dream, his “Platonic conception of himself,” with the dream of the discoverers
of America.

8. A Historical
Background
❖ Jazz Age:
❖ Roaring Twenties:
❖ Flapper Fashion:
❖ The Prohibition Act:
❖ Great War:
❖ Personal Context:

9. Jazz Age
-Fitzgerald wrote and set the novel in the 1920s, a time of great
change in U.S. society.
-Fitzgerald popularized the term “Jazz Age.” It’s used today to
define the period during which Fitzgerald lived and wrote about it.
-In Fitzgerald’s most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, jazz
appears as constant background music. In the contemporary
phenomenon of “Gatsby parties”—festivities intended to capture
the air of the titular Jay Gatsby’s famously lavish, bacchanalian
parties—jazz is de rigueur to evoke the 1920s.
-To Fitzgerald's special position in his age. That age was not all
"Jazz Age," and in spite of Fitzgerald's having, half-jokingly,
invented this name for the twenties, he was himself far from
representing merely this element in the period. "He was," as
Glenway Wescott put it for his generation, "our darling, our
genius, our fool.

10. -F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" to describe the
decade of decadence and prosperity that America enjoyed in the
1920s, which was also known as the Roaring Twenties. After
World War I ended in 1918, the United States and much of the rest
of the world experienced an enormous economic expansion.
-The surging economy turned the 1920s into a time of easy money,
hard drinking (despite the Prohibition amendment to the
Constitution), and lavish parties. Though the 1920s were a time of
great optimism, Fitzgerald portrays the much bleeker side of the
revelry by focusing on its indulgence, hypocrisy, shallow
recklessness, and its perilous—even fatal—consequences.
Roaring Twenties:

11. Flapper Fashion:
Also seen throughout The Great Gatsby
is the flapper culture. This period of
women’s liberation saw young women
with short hair and increased freedoms.
Jordan Baker is the best example of this
kind of woman. Despite society’s
changing nature, the world still hasn’t
accepted Jordan as an independent
person. She dates multiple men, says and
does what she wants, and is well-known
as an athlete. These features set her at a
stark distance from women in previous
generations. For many during this period,
she represented what was going wrong
with the United States. Fitzgerald’s
central characters in The Great Gatsby
are never this direct in their judgments of
her, but Nick and others do make passing
comments about her character

12. The Prohibition Act
-Prohibition is another important feature in the novel, one that some
scholars put at its heart. During this period, which lasted from 1920 to
1933, alcohol sales were made illegal in the United States. Those who
supported the ban cited a decline in morals, religion, and family values
as a result of drinking alcohol. Prohibition allowed Jay Gatsby to
accumulate his wealth. He and his partners bootlegged alcohol on the
black market, selling it illegally and making a great deal of money.
-Gatsby was able to rise into the ranks of the uber-wealthy in a way
that did not sit well with the “old money” families like the Buchanans.
It is this difference that puts West and East Egg slightly at odds. The
“old money” side is seen as more sophisticated and desirable than the
“new money” side.
-While it’s never clearly stated exactly what Gatsby is up to, there are
allusions that bootlegging is not the only business he’s in. There is
more darkness to Gatsby’s life than even Nick finds out. This is all
alluded to with rumors like he “was nephew to von Hindenburg and
second cousin to the devil.”

13. The Great war:1st world war
-The First World War was fought between July 1914 and November
1918. For a few years America refused to take part in the conflict, but in
April 1917 the president, Woodrow Wilson, declared that America
would join forces with Great Britain, France and their allies against
Germany and its allies. Nearly 3 million men were drafted into the
American army and many of them were sent to Europe.
-In this novel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are said to have been
amongst those soldiers sent to fight in France. Nick mentions
specifically the Battle of the Argonne Forest, an offensive in northern
France near the end of the war.
-In The Great Gatsby, both Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby
himself are veterans of World War I, and it is Gatsby's war service that
kicks off his rise from a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (in the words of
his romantic rival, Tom Buchanan) to the fabulously wealthy owner of a
mansion on West Egg, Long Island.

14. Personal Context
-Often, readers try to draw comparisons between
Fitzgerald’s life and the lives of the characters in
The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, is
sometimes compared to Daisy Buchanan. This
comparison is strengthened by the fact that the
two didn’t marry until Fitzgerald had published
his first book, and it proved to be a financial
success.
-This is similar to how Daisy and Gatsby didn’t
marry because the latter lacked the means to
give Daisy the life she wanted. This is why she
married Tom Buchanan and the loss that
inspired Gatsby to strive for the life he achieved.
It also led to his downfall and death.

15. Conclusion
-Novel The Great Gatsby Set in what was
called the Jazz Age (a term popularized by
Fitzgerald), or the Roaring Twenties, The
Great Gatsby vividly captures its
historical moment: the economic boom of
postwar America, the new jazz music, the
free-flowing illegal liquor.
-As Fitzgerald later remarked in an essay
about the era, it was “a whole race going
hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”

16. Work cited
Baldwin, Emma "The Great Gatsby Historical Context 🍾" Book Analysis, The Great Gatsby Historical Context |
Book Analysis. Accessed 8 March 2023.
Fitzgerald, Scott. “The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby Background.” SparkNotes,
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gatsby/context/. Accessed 8 March 2023.
"Historical Context: The Great Gatsby." EXPLORING Novels, Gale, 2003. Gale In Context: High School,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ2111500086/SUIC?u=clov94514&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=bed5a009. Accessed 8 Mar.
2023.
Hope College Students Dressed up as Flappers. The Joint Archives of Holland, JSTOR,
https://jstor.org/stable/community.27576334. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023.
Mizener, Arthur. "F. Scott Fitzgerald". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Dec. 2022,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/F-Scott-Fitzgerald. Accessed 8 March 2023.
Mizener, Arthur. “The F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 12, no. 4, 1951,
pp. 190–95. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/26402963. Accessed 8 Mar. 2023.