The Great Gatsby

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was on September 24, 1896 and was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though he was an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a boarding school in New Jersey in 1911. Despite not being as successful, he managed to enroll at Princeton, for not doing so while attending, he instead he joined the army in 1917, as the first World War neared its end. Meanwhile, his school life wasn't so successful Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant and was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama at Camp Sheridan, meanwhile he was stationed there he met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old named Zelda Sayre. As a result, with Zelda has an overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure caused their wedding to be delayed until Fitzgerald could prove to be a success. He achieved this by becoming a literary sensation thus earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. 1 Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby was said to include many events from Fitzgerald's early life. So the question raised is, did Fitzgerald include himself in The Great Gatsby? Many events in Fitzgerald's life are represented in the novel The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway a character in a novel is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, like Fitzgerald, educated at an Ivy league school (for Nick, at Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a 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. In Fitzgerald's case he falls in love with Zelda while being stationed at Camp Sheridan. After becoming a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately tr... ... middle of paper ... ...f his works, Fitzgerald linked the subject of money to vitality. Thought he wrote about the lives of the rich, it was the life he could not live, and with financial straits led Zelda to a sanitarium and led Fitzgerald to drink. This process shows the deterioration of overindulgence that brought the Jazz Age of 1920s into the Depression Era of the 1930s. In conclusion, Francis Scott Fitzgerald lived a very colorful life and, in the end, a very disastrous one, which was in result of his own making. Fitzgerald inserted these experiences into his work, The Great Gatsby is an example where he infuses these experiences into the characters in the novel with a depth of his own feelings. As a result, from reflecting his personal experiences into the novel, Nick Carraway and Gatsby, Fitzgerald teaches a lesson: The spoils of the good life can spoil a good man if allowed it.

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