F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
and The Roaring Twenties
AP English
1920-1929: Changing Times
The 1920s were a time of unprecedented
social and technological change in so many
areas:
Literature
Music
Media / Technology
Women’s Rights
Prohibition
Lifestyles
An economy stimulated by WWI
fueled a massive economic boom.
General Business Conditions
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Stable prices
High employment
Economic Boom
Prime interest rate
averaged less than 5%
• Stock yield higher than
bond yields
Income Distribution
• Equalizing effect of income tax during
the war but
• 1922: Top 1% held 32% of nation’s
wealth
• 1929: Top 1% held 38% of nation’s
wealth
• “The rich get rich and the poor get…
children”
The Roaring Twenties
The decade of the twenties is often referred to as the
“ Jazz Age’. However, the term has much as much to
do with the jazzy atmosphere of the time as with the
music!
Jazzy Sounds
• Prohibition brought many
jazz musicians north from
New Orleans to Chicago and
New York
• Joe “King” Oliver was one of
the best
• Jazz became the soundtrack
of rebellion for a younger
generation
Music in Gatsby
• You will read
about the “yellow
cocktail music” of
Gatsby’s parties.
• This was Jazz and
Ragtime
– Louis Armstrong,
– Duke Ellington
King Oliver
Jazzy Duds
• Flappers were typical
young girls of the
twenties, usually with
bobbed hair, short
skirts, rolled stockings,
and powdered knees!
• They danced the night
away doing the
Charleston and the
Black Bottom.
Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang
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All Wet - wrong
Bee’s Knees - a superb person
Big Cheese -an important person
Bump Off - to murder
Dumb Dora - a stupid girl
Flat Tire - a dull, boring person
Gam - a girls leg
Hooch - bootleg liquor
Hoofer - chorus girl
Torpedo - a hired gunman
Gee I wish a torpedo
would bump off this
flat tire
Dumb
Dora
Lifestyles and fashions of the
1920s
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No more Victorian Values
Flappers
Collegiate Students
Independent women
Gaiety
Increasing wealth
Social mobility
Alcohol consumption
Women’s Rights Movement
• Suffrage - the right to vote
• Nineteenth Amendment
(1920)
• Changing attitudes and
fashions help bring about the
new woman (Jordan Baker)
• The “Flap” Over Flappers:
http://www1.assumption.edu/u
sers/McClymer/his394/Flapo
verFlappers.html
The playful flapper here we see,
The fairest of the fair.
She’s not what Grandma used to
be,-You might say, au contraire.
Her girlish ways may make a
stir,
Her manners cause a scene
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.
She nightly knocks for many a
goal
The usual dancing men.
Her speed is great, but her
control
Is something else again
The Flapper
by Dorothy Parker
All spotlights focus on her
pranks.
All tongues her prowess herald
For which she well may render
thanks
To God and Scott Fitzgerald.
Her golden rule is plain enough-Just get them young and treat
them rough
Cole Porter – “Anything Goes”
Times have changed
And we've often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today any shock they should try to stem
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose.
Anything goes.
If driving fast cars you like,
If low bars you like,
If old hymns you like,
If bare limbs you like,
If Mae West you like,
Or me undressed you like,
Why, nobody will oppose.
When ev'ry night the set that's smart is inTruding in nudist parties in studios.
Anything goes.
Visual Portraits
Anything Goes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo6lPifGnGA
Thoroughly Modern Millie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C53j2eipfvM
&feature=related
The Artist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7pfLlsUQ
M
Prohibition
• The Volstead Act
• 18th Amendment
(1919) 21st
Amendment
Repealed (1933)
• Bootleggers
– Sold, bought,
consumed
alcohol.
– Gangsters
Al Capone and a ‘gonnection’
Media and Technology
• Automobilisation
– the car is available to many
• from courting to dating
• Mass Media
– Magazines and literacy
• Reader’s Digest
• Time
– Radios and advertising
– New forms of narrative
• Movie - “talkies” e.g. The
Jazz Singer
• Popular Sports
F Scott Fitzgerald
• 1896-1940
• Descendent from “prominent” American stock and
born into an upper-middle class Irish family
• Attended Princeton but left without graduating
• Missed WWI (just)
• Met Zelda but couldn’t afford to marry her while he
was training at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, AL
• Published This Side of Paradise in 1920 at the age of
24: instant stardom
• This increased his wealth, and Zelda, his “golden
girl,” decided to accept his hand in marriage after all.
• Wrote “money-making” popular fiction for most of
his life, mainly for the New York Post: $4000 a story
Fitzgerald Continued
• He and Zelda had a daughter, Frances “Scottie”
• Wrote what is considered his masterpiece, The Great
Gatsby, in France in 1924-25
• Zelda had an affair, and Gatsby was poorly received
• Attempts to earn a clean literary reputation were
disrupted by his reputation as a drunk
• Zelda became mentally unstable
• Scott had an affair with gossip columnist Shielah
Graham
• Moved to Hollywood as a screen writer
• Died almost forgotten aged 45
• Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948
Literature of the 1920s
• Authors wrote about
their personal lives as
something “knowable”.
• Gatsby contains a great
deal of autobiographical
material and references
to the 1920s.
• Fitzgerald was also
influenced by Modernist
theories about art.
Modernism in the Twenties
The Modernist Era
• Rejection of Romanticism and the
advent of moral uncertainty
– the catastrophe of World War I
– (the wasteland and valley of ashes)
• Embracing the new, i.e. mechanization
and industrialization
– (Gatsby’s car)
– new (replaceable) fashions
– mass entertainment
• Using new means of Representation
– the development of cinema
– the mass media and advertising
Literary Periods in American
Literature
• Pre-settlement period (prior to 1620s)
• Puritanism (1620s-1783)
• Enlightenment/Colonialism (second half of
18th century)
• Romanticism/Transcendentalism (1820s1861)
• Realism (1860s-1890s)
• Naturalism (1890s-1950s)
• Modernism (1914-1945)
• Post WWII (1945-)
Modernism and Nick Carraway
• Because of the chaos there was a
longing for order.
• The modernist generation produced
utopian ideologies such as
communism, fascism, and futurism.
• Look at Nick in his retreat from the
modern word.
• “I wanted the world to be in uniform
and to stand to a sort of moral
attention forever”
Modernism and Romanticism
Nick
Gatsby
Fitzgerald and Modernism
• Modernists mistrusted the possibility of absolute truth
and idealism.
• Consider the multiple and limited points-of-view
employed in Gatsby. What effect does this have on
the concept of absolute truth?
• How does Nick force us to view the “reality” that he
portrays?
• In modernist literature “loose ends” were embraced
rather resolved clearly. What does this suggest about
the truth?
Is The Great Gatsby a period
piece, or does the novel step
outside its time and address
universal themes?