Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24th, 1896. Mary McQuillan, his mother, came from an Irish-Catholic …show more content…
Americans shifted from farmers to city-dwellers, and the total nation’s wealth more than doubled. A sense of liberation rooted from the rise of consumer culture, mass entertainment, and “revolution in morals and manners.” Gender roles, hair styles, and dress profoundly changed. The 1920’s was a decade of “prosperity and dissipation, and of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers.” The younger generation rebelled against the traditional standards, while their elders sat back in speculation (Digital History, …show more content…
Fitzgerald earned only two thousand dollars from the novel; the same amount he received from one of his short stories published in the newspaper. The New York Evening World described the book as “a valiant effort to be ironical,” and “a dud.” By the time he died in 1940, Fitzgerald only earned thirteen dollars from The Great Gatsby. However, following Fitzgerald’s death and the fade of the Jazz Age, readers “were willing to revisit the novel and consider its literary merit anew.” Between 1941 and 1949, The Great Gatsby was published in seventeen editions. By 1960, the novel was considered “a classic of twentieth-century American fiction.” Now, since 1925, more than twenty five million copies of the novel have been sold across the world (Reach, Kirsten). Fitzgerald was a modernist writer who still has an impact on readers today. His most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, is considered one of the greatest Modernist novels after nearly ninety years. Through the story, Fitzgerald revealed his own life experiences and the true corruption of the upper class. The story of the puzzling millionaire, Jay Gatsby, still holds a strong position in the Modernists works that are still read