The Great Gatsby's Accomplishments

In 1914, the world was plunged into arguably one of its darkest times in history, The Great War. Young farm boys left their farms and were pitted against death on a daily basis, not knowing whether or not they would survive the next hour, or succumb to machine gun fire and mortar shells. Once the war ended, life was pushed to return to its previous state, however after witnessing the horrors of the battlefield, the once farm boys decided that they wanted to go out and live extravagantly in the big cities. This was the very common mindset of many people in the 1920’s (“The Roaring Twenties”). The 1920’s, later known as the “Roaring Twenties” was a time of prosperity and change. The nation’s wealth as a whole more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and for the first time more Americans lived in the urban cities than farms (“The Roaring Twenties”). As the factories became machine run, the normal hours for a week of an urban blue collar worker fell from 56 to 44, yet their wages rose up by 25 percent (Zeitz “Roaring Twenties”). American society transformed into a consumer society that was based in indulgence and material items. Suddenly people coast to coast were buying the same …show more content…
Scott Fitzgerald was a revolutionary modernist author, who through his novel The Great Gatsby, critiqued the changing atmosphere of the 1920’s and displayed his idea of how the American Dream has become corrupted. Fitzgerald had lived in a very similar lifestyle of the characters in his book, making him the perfect chronicler of the times. Even so, Fitzgerald saw how the American Dream had changed with The Great War from the idea of hard work and determination into money and pleasure being the real happiness. People didn’t want to go back to working hard after almost dying on a daily basis. Even though The Great Gatsby was not an instant hit, or very well received at all for that matter, when it was first published, today it is one of the greatest examples of a modernist novel in