The Great Gatsby: Background Info

Author Bio

Full Name: Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Date of Birth: 1896

Place of Birth: St. Paul, Minnesota

Date of Death: 1940

Brief Life Story: F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in New York City, attended a few private schools, and went to Princeton University. In 1917, Princeton put Fitzgerald on academic probation. He enlisted in the Army. On base in Alabama in 1918, he met and fell in love with Zelda Zayre, who refused to marry him unless he could support her. He returned to New York to pursue fame and fortune. The publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920, made Fitzgerald a literary star. He married Zelda one week later. In 1924, the couple moved to Paris, where Fitzgerald began work on The Great Gatsby. Though now considered his masterpiece, the novel sold only modestly. The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States in 1927. Fitzgerald published several more novels, including Tender is the Night (1933), but none matched the success of his first. Deep in debt because of their ritzy lifestyle, the Fitzgeralds began to spiral into alcoholism and mental illness. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. Zelda died eight years later in a fire.

Key Facts

Full Title: The Great Gatsby

Genre: Novel

Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922

Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy

Protagonist: Jay Gatsby

Antagonists: Tom Buchanan

Narrator: Nick Carraway

Point of View: First person

Historical and Literary Context

Where Written: Paris and the US, in 1924

When Published: 1925

Literary Period: Modernism

Related Literary Works: Modernist fiction attempted to represent the sense of emptiness and disillusionment that dominated Europe and the United States after World War I. In this way, Gatsby can be considered as related to such modernist works as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). But The Great Gatsby and all of Fitzgerald’s works are best compared to those written by other Americans such as Ernest Hemingway, members of the “Lost Generation” of American writers who moved to Europe after World War I. All these writers depicted the reality, corruption, and sadness of the human condition, but Fitzgerald most effectively portrayed the American cultural moment he called the “Jazz Age.”

Related Historical Events: Fitzgerald coined the term “Jazz Age” to refer to the period more commonly known as the Roaring Twenties. Jazz is an American style of music marked by its complex and exuberant mix of rhythms and tonalities. The Great Gatsby portrays a similarly complex mix of emotions and themes that reflect the turbulence of the times. Fresh off the nightmare of World War I, Americans were enjoying the fruits of an economic boom and a renewed sense of possibility. But in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s stresses the darker side of the Roaring Twenties, its undercurrent of corruption and its desperate, empty decadence.

Extra Credit

Puttin’ on the Fitz. Fitzgerald spent most of his adult life in debt, often relying on loans from his publisher, and even his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in order to pay the bills. The money he made from his novels could not support the high-flying cosmopolitan life his wife desired, so Fitzgerald turned to more lucrative short story writing for magazines like Esquire. Fitzgerald spent his final three years writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Another Failed Screenwriter. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and his wife Zelda suffered from serious mental illness. In the final years of their marriage as their debts piled up, Zelda stayed in a series of mental institutions on the East coast while Fitzgerald tried, and largely failed, to make money writing movie scripts in Hollywood.