Symbolism In The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an amazing writer who lived during the Roaring 20’s and the Great Depression. Though he mostly wrote lone-standing books, he was an incredible and moving author. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels were inspired by his wife and muse, Zelda Fitzgerald, and his books carried a lot of symbolism. Fitzgerald’s life was one of excess and luxury. The son of Mary McQuillan and Edward Fitzgerald (and a distant relative of Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner), Edward Fitzgerald went to several schools as a child. From the age of 13 to 14, he went to St. Paul Academy, after that, he went to the Catholic Newman School. He got into Princeton University, but he dropped out to join the US army in the wake of World War I. Though he never saw combat, he was shipped to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama as a Second Lieutenant. It was there that he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, and 18-year-old girl who would become his future wife. Fitzgerald himself was never deployed into war. He married Zelda Sayre in 1920, after the success of his first novel, The Side of Paradise. They had one daughter who was born a year later, and they named her Frances Scott Fitzgerald. In 1922, Fitzgerald came out with his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. In 1924, he moved to Valescure, France, where he wrote

Fitzgerald lived the prime of his life in the Roaring 20’s. At this time, the ban on drinking had made alcohol even more popular than it was before. Wall Street was booming, and national morale was at a high. It was in this that Fitzgerald lived, when drinking, gambling, and bootlegging ran amok up and down the east coast. He grew up in an environment of rule-breaking, corruption, and debauchery, and this undoubtedly influenced the overall course of his life and writings. His greatest complete novel is set in the very heart of the Roaring 20’s: New York