1. Francis Scott Fitzgerald

2. Literary Position of Fitzgerald
The Singer of the Jazz Age
The most representative writer of the 1920s, the most noisy age in America history
The best chronicler of the Jazz Age (an age of disillusionment and great ecstasy and also of great spiritually activity
An insider and outsider (double vision) of many of his novels

3. Life of Fitzgerald Born in St. Paul, Minnesota
Father the descendents of southern colonial landowners and legislators; mother Irish immigrants who guided his study
Low-esteem due to his family poverty and aspiration for wealth
Princeton University from 1913, and getting to know his later helper Edmund Wilson
Quit college to join the army in 1917, but WWI ended before he really fought it
In 1919 going to New York City to make a fortune to win a Alabama belle Zelda Sayre who rejected him before and succeeded

4. Life of Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise (1920), a best-seller expressing the voice of youth in the 1920s, making him rich and famous and a winner of Zelda
A lot of money made by Flappers and Philosophers (1921), Tales of the Jazz Age （1922）and novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922）for the new couple’s extremely luxurious life in New York City, St. Paul and on Long Island
Trip to Europe in 1924 and befriending expatriates like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pound
The Great Gatsby (1925) during his stay to Europe

5. Life of Fitzgerald
178 short stories in the 1920s, most of which published on Saturday Post, but the couple still in debt
Scott getting alcoholic and Zelda mentally breaking down and hospitalized in a mental institution near Baltimore who finally dying in a hospital fire in 1948
Tender is the Night (1934), telling a mentally bankrupted young psychiatrist whose career eroded by marriage to belle patient
Turning to Hollywood Screen writer in 1937, but death of heart attack in 1940
The Crack-Up (1945), writings and essays

6. Works of Fitzgerald (1)Novels
“This Side of Paradise (life in Princeton, frustration of young men)
“The Beautiful and the Damned” (love story with Zelda)
“The Great Gatsby” (masterpiece)
“Tender is the Night”
“The Last Tycoon” (unfinished)

7. Works (2)Short story collection “The Flappers and Philosophers”
“Tales of the Jazz Age” (The 1920s was called “the Jazz Age” because of this book.)
“All the Sad Young Man”
“Taps at Reveille”

8. The Great Gatsby
T. S. Eliot called it “the first step made by American novels after Henry James.”

9. Daisy and Tom (a cold-hearted, aristocratic bully)
The Great Gatsby
Characters
Nick
Gatsby
Daisy and Tom (a cold-hearted, aristocratic bully)
Myrtle Wilson and Mr. Wilson

10. Jay Gatsby (Illegally) rich and Symbol of American Dream
Gatsby the aloof, enigmatic host of the unbelievably opulent parties who appears in Chapter 3
Despising the poor
Gorgeous parties
Grandeur of mansion in West Egg
Changing his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby to represent his reinvention of himself
Desire to appear to the reader
Re-image of Gatsby
Dreamed love for Daisy (or rather for Daisy’s aura of luxury, grace, and charm)
Gatsby revealing himself to be an innocent, hopeful young man who stakes everything on his unworthy dreams (in the 1920s)

11. Nick
Reflecting the quiet, reflective Midwesterner part of Fitzgerald adrift in the lurid East while Gatsby the personality, the flashy celebrity part
Reliable witness and teller of the story
Double attitudes: On the one hand, Nick is attracted to the fast-paced, fun-driven lifestyle of New York. On the other hand, he finds that lifestyle grotesque, damaging, even disgusting
Final return to west

12. Daisy Image of Zelda, Fitzgerald’s wife Lover of wealthy life
beautiful, charming, fickle, shallow, bored, sardonic, careless
The amoral values of the aristocratic East Egg set in the 1920s

13. Dream for material success Striving for a success Dream for love
The Great Gatsby
The disillusionment of American Dream
Dream for material success
Striving for a success
Dream for love

14. The Great Gatsby The double vision Gatsby as the protagonist
The narrator Nick as the outsider of Gatsby’s story and an insider: Gatsby’s neighbor, Daisy’s cousin, Tom’s college classmate; threading the events together and providing moral judgment about other characters
Gatsby Fitzgerald’s desire for wealthy life; Nick a critic of Fitzgerald

15. The silliness of his great dream for a love that doesn’t exist
The Great Gatsby
The greatness of Gatsby
A persisting dreamer for success both materially and spiritually, different from his contemporaries
The silliness of his great dream for a love that doesn’t exist

16. Ash Valley and the Doctor’s Eye
The Great Gatsby
Symbols
Green light
West Egg and East Egg
Ash Valley and the Doctor’s Eye