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Released in 1925, The Great Gatsby is place in nyc and Long Island during the Prohibition era (remember, the Prohibition era was a time where alcohol was prohibited, however old you had been -- yowsa). Flappers? It has got them. Parties? You bet? Cool cars? Absolutely--but more on this in a moment. The issue is, writer F.

Scott Fitzgerald did not see the Jazz Age as all about fashionable music and sparkly clothes. He associated the whole period with materialism ("I need things! A Great Deal of things!") and immorality. For a number of the article-World War I age's newly wealthy, materialism and immortality were the name of the game. The novel's celebrity is Jay Gatsby, a young, wealthy guy in love with a society woman from his past.

And that is not the only reason why Gatsby still feels brand new today. The novel's very name has become a type of buzzword for periods of surplus and imitation luxury.

In both cases, however, unsustainable boom times contributed to devastating crashes with deep cultural consequences. From the 1920s, it had been a bubble in stocks which attracted easy prosperity, while at our own time the bubble had been at the housing industry. In the times, easy money supposed that a lot of individuals could begin to dream of living out their days such as Jay Gatsby, with lifetime as only one grand party in a seersucker suit. However, as that vision of easy luxury crashed and burnt (in both 1929 and 2008), newfound hard times necessitated a redefinition of the American Dream.

Narrator Nick Carraway is equally mesmerized and disgusted by Gatsby's extravagant way of life, just as Fitzgerald promised to sense about the "Jazz Age" excesses that he himself adopted. As an Ivy League educated, middle-class Midwesterner, '' Fitzgerald (such as Nick) watched the shallow materialism of the age. However (such as Gatsby) Fitzgerald came back in World War I and fell in love with a wealthy southern socialite -- Zelda Sayre.

Since Fitzgerald did really partake from the Jazz Age's decadent high life, it is not surprising that the particulars of the characters and setting make The Great Gatsby a type of time capsule of the 1920s. Gatsby is educated all around the world partly because it is a history lesson and novel all rolled into one tasty heap of intrigue.

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