The Great Gatsby Introduction

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Let's play a game called Free Association. When we say the words "Roaring Twenties," what are the first things that pop into your head? Go for it. We'll wait here for you.

Cool? Let's check out your list. Maybe you came up with something like this:

Flappers. Definitely flappers

Bobs

Bootleggers

The Harlem Renaissance

Cool cars

Partays

Those long cigarette holders and old movie stars

Boardwalk Empire

If you're looking at that list and thinking, Sweet!, you're in luck. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is set in New York City and Long Island during the Prohibition era (remember, the Prohibition era was a time in which alcohol was illegal, no matter how old you were – yowsa). Flappers? It's got them. Parties? You bet? Cool cars? Absolutely—but more on that in a minute or jump ahead to our Great Gatsby summary.

The problem is, author F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't see the Jazz Age as all about hip music and sparkly clothes. He associated the entire period with materialism ("I want things! Lots of things!") and immorality. For many of the post-World War I era's newly wealthy, materialism and immortality were the name of the game. The novel's star is Jay Gatsby, a young, rich man in love with a society girl from his past. A girl who, as it happens, is married to someone else.

Do we smell a Twilight-esque love triangle approaching?

And that's not the only reason why Gatsby still feels fresh today. The novel's very title has become a kind of buzzword for periods of excess and fake luxury. The economic collapse of 2008 brought back distant and unwelcome memories of the stock market crash of 1929, casting the boom times of the 1990s and early 2000s as the modern-day version of the Roaring Twenties.

In both cases, though, unsustainable boom times led to devastating crashes with profound cultural consequences. In the 1920s, it had been a bubble in stocks that brought easy prosperity, while in our own time the bubble had been in the housing market. In both times, easy money meant that many people could begin to dream of living out their days like Jay Gatsby, with life as just one grand party in a seersucker suit. But as that vision of easy luxury crashed and burned (in both 1929 and 2008), newfound hard times required a redefinition of the American Dream.

And while Gatsby is a work of fiction, Fitzgerald's real life contains some suspicious similarities. (Gulp.) Narrator Nick Carraway is both mesmerized and disgusted by Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle, just as Fitzgerald claimed to feel about the "Jazz Age" excesses that he himself adopted. As an Ivy League educated, middle-class Midwesterner, Fitzgerald (like Nick) saw through the shallow materialism of the era. But (like Gatsby) Fitzgerald came back from World War I and fell in love with a wealthy southern socialite – Zelda Sayre.

The Great Gatsby is swaddled in Fitzgerald's simultaneous embrace of and disdain for 1920s luxury. Since Fitzgerald did indeed partake in the Jazz Age's decadent high life, it's not surprising that the details of the setting and characters make The Great Gatsby a sort of time capsule of the 1920s. Gatsby is taught all over the world partly because it's a history lesson and novel all rolled into one delicious wrap of intrigue.

Mmmmm…intrigue.