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F Scott Fitzgerald's Influence On The Great Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic novel “The Great Gatsby” has a deep influence on American popular culture. It has been a part of the larger cultural conversation in the United States over the past several decades. Fitzgerald’s third novel “The Great Gatsby” is widely regarded as one of the prime contenders for the title “the great American novel”, alongside with works of “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, and “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel has been regarded a touchstone for generations of readers and writers. It is considered a quintessential American novel. The novel is taught in college and high school classrooms, in countless secondary schools, in undergraduate and graduate courses throughout the world. “The Great Gatsby” is ranked among the top five most …show more content…

It is a powerful criticism towards American society, as the author holds up a mirror to the society of which he was part. Set during the era, “the Jazz Age”, a phrase that Fitzgerald came up with, “The Great Gatsby” chronicles the life of a dreamer whose pursuit of an ideal save him from corruption. His dream is the American dream, his successes and his failures are America’s failures. It is a dream corrupted by money and betrayed by carelessness. There are few Americans, who do not have at least a little touch of Gatsby in them. Fitzgerald uses a language of a rich complex mixture drawn from a wide variety of sources, including Romantic poetry, biblical and Christian discourse, the modernist prose of James Joyce, and the Modernist poetry of T. S. Elliot, American slang and educated speech of the 1920s, advertisements and popular song lyrics. All these features are assimilated into a distinctive style which can be called “Romantic Modernism”. (Nicolas Tredell, 2007, pp.

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