To be sure, most Americans didn’t have gold faucets, and very few enjoyed anything approximating Jay Gatsby’s wealth, but ordinary Americans still shared in the general prosperity. When a prominent Philadelphia banking family raised eyebrows for installing gold fixtures in its bathrooms, a spokesman for the clan shrugged off the criticism, explaining simply that “ou don’t have to polish them you know.” From a relative standpoint, America was rich, and it showed. The United States had entered World War I a debtor nation and emerged as Europe’s largest creditor, to the tune of $12.5 billion.
Between 19 the country’s gross national product jumped from $69 billion to $93 billion while aggregate wages rose from roughly $36.4 billion to $51.5 billion. And on Mondays eight servants, including a extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.” Much like the Roaring Twenties, life in the shadow of Jay Gatsby was a wonder.Ĭonsider the context in which Fitzgerald was writing: America in the 1920s was undergoing dynamic changes. On week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights,” he confides. Caraway described the opulence of Gatsby’s beachside mansion on Long Island and the extravagance of the parties he threw. (If you want to know what that lie was, read the novel!) In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald exposed the excesses of the 1920s-a prosperous age in which many Americans came to enjoy the blessings of consumerism and excess, only to see it all crash around them with the Great Depression that arrived in 1929. For as the book’s narrator, Nick Caraway, discovers, Gatsby’s money and fame were built on a lie. In many ways, the novel was emblematic of its time. Ironically, it was there-some thousand miles away from home, in his comfortable perch in the French Mediterranean-that Scott wrote what was arguably the most important American novel of the age: The Great Gatsby.Ī tale of love and betrayal, Fitzgerald’s novel told the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor boy of obscure origins who rises to great wealth and prestige. Raphäel, “a red little town built close to the sea,” Scott explained to a friend, “with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it.” Their villa was studded with balconies of blue and white Moorish tiles and surrounded by a fragrant orchard of lemon, olive, and palm trees that gave way to a long gravel road-the only passageway out of their Mediterranean castle. Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, they rented an enormous stone villa that rested 2.5 kilometers above St. In 1923 the young couple (he was twenty-seven, she was twenty-three) set sail for France. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse them of frugality. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things.
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