The Great Gatsby: A Level York Notes

• The First World War, also known as The Great War, was a predominantly European conflict fought between July 1914 and November 1918.
• America was drawn into the conflict in 1917.
• The demands of war accelerated America’s industrial production resulting in the economic boom of the 1920s.
• Nick Carraway says that he participated in the Great War, and it left him feeling ‘restless’ (p. 9). Nick tells us that Jay Gatsby ‘did extraordinarily well in the war’ (p. 143).

• The 1920s in America became known as The Jazz Age because this popular musical genre of the day reflected a spirit of rebelliousness and pleasure-seeking.
• The Jazz Age was in part a reaction to the First World War, which was seen as the end of an era.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald became known as the major chronicler of the Jazz Age.
• The Great Gatsby addresses deeply serious issues that lay behind the decade’s rebelliousness and pleasure-seeking.

• Between 1920 and 1933 there was a ban on making and selling alcohol in America.
• A great deal of alcohol is consumed nonetheless in the pages of this novel.
• The unlawful supplying of alcohol was known as bootlegging.
• It is rumoured that bootlegging was the source of Jay Gatsby’s wealth.

• By the 1920s New York had become a major commercial and industrial city, making use of the latest advances in engineering.
• Immigration, including internal migration of African Americans from the South, made it a racially and culturally mixed city.
• John Dos Passos, in his novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), depicted New York as an impersonal machine-like city, with rootless people passing through it.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald focuses his novel on an individual who stands out from the mass society of the city.

• In America, the early decades of the twentieth century saw great leaps forward in technological innovation and mass production.
• The telephone and the automobile, both fairly recent inventions, were starting to modify social behaviour through their impact on communication and travel.
• Both play a significant role in The Great Gatsby, although their effect is not necessarily positive.
• In Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D. H. Lawrence argues that Americans are prolific inventors because they are ‘idealists’ who prefer to ‘let a machine do the doing’.