How Did History Influence Fitzgerald's Literature

772 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Relationship between Daisy and Gatsby in the great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Historical Effects On Fitzgerald’s Literature
The 1920’s had many names, The Roaring 20's, The Boom, and The Jazz Age, just to name a few. This was a time of speakeasies, mobsters, flappers, and great literary work. One of the most iconic names of 1920’s writing was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote many novels including: The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams, and The Rich Boy. Society’s historical influence on Fitzgerald and his writing is shown throughout his work.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896. During his life, he became an iconic writer. In 1917 Fitzgerald dropped out of school and joined the army; however, World War One had ended in 1918, before he was deployed. After the war, he moved to New York City. Then, at the age of twenty-four he married his beloved wife Zelda Sayre. [Biography.com Editors] Fitzgerald had become an alcoholic and eventually died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
There are many similarities between Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, and The Rich Boy, which reflect the Jazz Age. One of the similarities lies in their characterization. The characters include, Winter Dreams’ Dexter and Judy, The Great Gatsby’s Gatsby and Daisy, and The Rich Boy’s Anson and Paula. In each work, the main characters, fall into a …show more content…

It is no surprise that Fitzgerald’s female characters were portrayed as lustful pieces property. Also, historical views about the famous American Dream shine bright through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work. Dexter and Gatsby both start out with very little money and reputation, but by the end of each composition both Dexter and Gatsby are rich and well known. This perfectly depicts the 1920’s view of the American Dream. The era was famous for making average people into stars. Characterization is not the only aspect of Fitzgerald's writing which incorporates historical social views. History is also portrayed through the settings of many of his

Show More
Related

  • A Comparison Of The Novels Of The Great Gatsby And Judy Fitzgerald

    1119 Words  | 3 Pages

    Francis Scott Fitzgerald, also known under his writer’s name, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is revered as a famous American novelist for his writing masterpieces in the 1920’s and 1930’s. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about his extravagant lifestyle in America that his wife, Zelda, their friends, and him lived during that era. In fact, a lot of his novels and essays were based off of real-life situations with exaggerated plots and twists. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels were the readers looking glass into his tragic life that resulted in sad endings in his books, and ultimately his own life. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a nice neighborhood, but growing up, he wasn’t privileged.

    Read More

  • Writers of the 1920's

    483 Words  | 1 Pages

    The 1920's had many influential writers in literature. While reaching this time period it is almost certain that the names William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald will be found. Each of the writers has their own personal style of writing and each one of the lives has influenced what they write about to even the way they each portray their literature.

    Read More

  • Flaws In The Great Gatsby

    514 Words  | 2 Pages

    However, Fitzgerald does not write Gatsby as a bad person who embodies all that is wrong with western capitalism. Instead, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as a good man who was victim of the qualities ingrained in him by an imperfect ideological system. It is this distinction which makes Fitzgerald’s argument all the more potent, and his audience’s ability to mourn Gatsby as a tragic figure all the more important. Whereas Fitzgerald’s opinion of Gatsby may otherwise have been misconstrued as a negative one, the scene of Gatsby’s funeral clearly conveys the character of Gatsby as a tragic and sorrowful one. The character of Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s commentary on the logical fallacies of the American Dream are closely intertwined, which is why Fitzgerald goes to such great lengths to separate the two.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Winter Dreams And The Great Gatsby

    1333 Words  | 3 Pages

    One’s parents owned the second best grocery store, and the other was a poor boy whose parents had no money. But these two have a similarity that makes the story better to understand who they are. For “The Great Gatsby” it seems to us that F. Scott Fitzgerald loves winding sentences that begin with one idea, person, or location and end up somewhere else entirely, and for “Winter Dreams” there is a strong sense of time passing. There is a similar tone in these two stories; a great example, in this story “Winter Dreams” author F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions the following quote, “During dinner [Judy] slipped into a moody depression which gave Dexter a feeling of uneasiness.

    Read More

  • Horrors of WWI Reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Writing

    2584 Words  | 6 Pages

    Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...

    Read More

  • The Dynamic Friendship of Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald

    2093 Words  | 5 Pages

    In 1930 F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were both working on novels; Fitzgerald was writing Tender is the Night and Hemingway Death in the Afternoon. They were both living in vastly different places and dealing with different types of situations in their lives. Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott's wife, was hospitalized in Switzerland for the better part of 1930-31 after suffering a mental breakdown. Unfortunately for Scott this meant that he had to put aside his novel writing and write several short stories which would be sold to cover the cost of Zelda's medical treatment. Hemingway was residing in the United States during this time but also traveled to Spain during this period. There was no correspondence between the two about Zelda's illness until April, 1931, almost a year after her hospitalization.

    Read More

  • 1920's in The Great Gatsby

    997 Words  | 2 Pages

    Dubbed the ‘roaring 20s’, because of the massive rise in America’s economy, this social and historical context is widely remembered for its impressive parties and sensationalist attitude. However, Fitzgerald also conveys a more sinister side to this culture through numerous affairs, poverty and a rampage of organised crime. By exposing this moral downfall, Fitzgerald reveals to the responder his value of the American dream and his belief of its decline. As a writer, Fitzgerald was always very much concerned with the present times, consequently, his writing style and plot reflects his own experiences of this era. So similar were the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters to his own that he once commented, “sometimes I don't know whether Zelda (his wife) and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. In 1924, Fitzgerald was affected by Zelda’s brief affair with a young French pilot, provoking him to lock her in their house. A construction of this experience can be seen in the way Fitzgerald depicts the 1290s context. For example in ‘The Great Gatsby’, there are numerous affairs and at one point, Mr Wilson locks up his wife to pre...

    Read More

  • Moralism In The Great Gatsby

    1221 Words  | 3 Pages

    The 1920’s was a tumultuous time for a young generation in search of a little fun. After World War I, gender roles were no longer the concrete pillars of society and the roaring 20’s era was born out of the ensuing chaos. This chaos included jazz, loose morals, and the sale of illegal alcohol that would ensure this generation of rabble-rousers would be notorious. Many writers attempted to capture the essence of this remarkable time. One of the most prolific of these writers, and one of the biggest contributors to the language that now surrounds the time, was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through the theme of the deterioration of the American dream and American morals and traditions, F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected his life in the jazz age, including

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Final Essay

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    Through the use of symbolism and critique, F. Scott Fitzgerald is able to elucidate the lifestyles and dreams of variously natured people of the 1920s in his novel, The Great Gatsby. He uses specific characters to signify diverse groups of people, each with their own version of the “American Dream.” Mostly all of the poor dream of transforming from “rags to riches”, while some members of the upper class use other people as their motivators. In any case, no matter how obsessed someone may be about their “American Dream”, Fitzgerald reasons that they are all implausible to attain.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby: America in the 1920s

    2392 Words  | 5 Pages

    Considered as the defining work of the 1920s, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925, when America was just coming out of one of the most violent wars in the nation’s history. World War 1 had taken the lives of many young people who fought and sacrificed for our country on another continent. The war left many families without fathers, sons, and husbands. The 1920s is an era filled with rich and dazzling history, where Americans experienced changes in lifestyle from music to rebellion against the United States government. Those that were born into that era grew up in a more carefree, extravagant environment that would affect their interactions with others as well as their attitudes about themselves and societal expectations.

    Read More

  • Childhood Influences Impact the Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald

    1035 Words  | 3 Pages

    On Wednesday February 12 of 1890 F. Scott Fitzgerald's parents were married in Washington D.C. Six years later on September 24, 1896 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born at his home 481 Laurel Ave. in St. Paul, Minnesota. His two infant older sisters had died from a violent influenza so that by the time Fitzgerald came along Mollie Fitzgerald had become the proverbial nightmare that known as an overprotective mother. Fitzgerald's mother was no traditional mother though, for she was known for her eccentricities. These eccentricities disturbed young Scott's life, "Fitzgerald later described his mother as 'half insane with pathological nervous worry'" (Bruccoli 15), but nothing worried anyone in the family so much as his father's failure to hold down a job. It was because his father lost his job as a wicker furniture manufacturer and salesman the family was forced to move from St. Paul to Buffalo in April of 1898, where his father began work for Proctor and Gamble. In January of 1901 the family moved from Buffalo to Syracuse where Edward had been transferred by his employer and where, on Sunday July 21, 1901 Scott's younger sister Annabel was born. Just two years later the family was back in Buffalo and just five years after that the family had returned to St. Paul and Grandma McQuillan's money.

    Read More

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life During The Great Depression

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    Biography quotes, “One week later, he married the woman he loved and his muse, Zelda Sayre. However by the end of the 1920s Fitzgerald descended into drinking, and Zelda had a mental breakdown.” (Biography.com). Fitzgerald's’ life becomes more havoc as he attempts to release a novel titled Tender Is the Night during the Great Depression, the novel was a failure. Later after the failed attempt of trying to release a masterpiece novel, he fled to California, where his addiction to alcohol gets worse. In 1941, as Fitzgerald is in the process of writing his novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald dies from a random heart

    Read More

  • Corruption of the American Dream in the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    1440 Words  | 3 Pages

    In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald employs the use of characters, themes, and symbolism to convey the idea of the American Dream and its corruption through the aspects of wealth, family, and status. In regards to wealth and success, Fitzgerald makes clear the growing corruption of the American Dream by using Gatsby himself as a symbol for the corrupted dream throughout the text. In addition, when portraying the family the characters in Great Gatsby are used to expose the corruption growing in the family system present in the novel. Finally, the American longing for status as a citizen is gravely overshot when Gatsby surrounds his life with walls of lies in order to fulfill his desires for an impure dream. F. Scot. Fitzgerald, through his use of symbols, characters, and theme, displays for the reader a tale that provides a commentary on the American dream and more importantly on its corruption.

    Read More

  • Textual Analysis Of The Great Gatsby

    947 Words  | 2 Pages

    F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most compelling twentieth century writers, (Curnutt, 2004). The year 1925 marks the year of the publication of Fitzgerald’s most credited novel, The Great Gatsby (Bruccoli, 1985). With its critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream (Berman, 1996), this dramatic idyllic novel, (Harvey, 1957), although poorly received at first, is now highly regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work (Rohrkemper, 1985) and is his publisher, Scribner 's most popular title, (Donahue, 2013). The novel achieved it’s status as one of the most influential novels in American history around the nineteen fifties and sixties, over ten years after Fitzgerald 's passing, (Ibid, 1985)

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Book Report

    3257 Words  | 7 Pages

    In writing this book, commonly refered to as the “Great American Novel”, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved in showing future generations what the early twenties were like, and the kinds of people that lived then. He did this in a beautifully written novel with in-depth characters, a captivating plot, and a wonderful sense of the time period.

    Read More

More about How Did History Influence Fitzgerald's Literature

Open Document