Corruption In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The 1920s, also known as the Jazz Age, is a time of moral decrease and happiness for Americans. The Great Gatsby is told from the view of Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest who moves to the East to make his fortune. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s through corruption, greed, and the attainment of wealth through Carraway’s story.

Fitzgerald accurately portrays the 1920s in The Great Gatsby through corruption by using the characters Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel. During the 1920s the eighteenth Amendment in 1919, attempted to get rid of alcohol. Instead of ending the use of alcohol, prohibition prompted the growth of organized crime. “The movement, known as Prohibition, may well go down as one of the biggest legislative backfires

Fitzgerald uses Wolfsheim to portray the corruption of the Jazz Age by causing Nick to record Wolfsheim as “the man who fixed the World Series in 1919.” Gambling is another means of corruption that takes place in the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald portrays in The Great Gatsby by means of Meyer Wolfsheim. The World Series in 1919 is an actual event between two highly competitive teams but the 1919 World Series was fixed. According to my research, The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period. Fitzgerald portrays this corruption by using an actual event that takes place during the 1920s in the

During the 1920s the economy began to turn around and Americans felt the need to have more than they actually needed. Daisy, the love interest of Gatsby, loves money. Daisy stays with her unfaithful husband because of his money and Gatsby becomes rich because he feels the only way to win Daisy is by becoming rich. When Nick describes Tom and Daisy in this quote “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” (Fitzgerald) He says that they don’t really care about their money and just have other people clean up after them because they could afford it. Fitzgerald portrays the women of the Jazz age correctly using Daisy to state that “all they think about is money.”(Fitzgerald) Myrtle Wilson shows her greed quite often in The Great Gatsby whenever she purchases something. When she leaves the New York train station, she sees an old man selling dogs and she instantly asks for a police dog. The man tells her he only has an Airedale and that the coat is waterproof, but she still wants to buy it. Myrtle, like Daisy, uses Tom to get anything they want and they always want more. The women of the Jazz Age, like Daisy and Myrtle, feel they had to look perfect because