The Lost Generation II

• The Lost Generation II

The country from which so many of the Lost Generation abandoned was enjoying a period of unprecedented prosperity. America in the 1920’s exploded with wealth, producing a boom era. In this atmosphere of abundance and changes resulting from urbanization, industrialization, and the war, many abandoned the conventions of America life. The young mocked puritanical moral restrictions; girls shortened their skirts, their hair, and began to smoke; secret unlicensed bars thrived despite government prohibition of the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Because it sounded everywhere, expressing the unconventional, gay, abandoned spirit of the period, the twenties came to be termed the “Jazz Age.”

This prosperity was not to last, however. It ended for several reasons, one of which was the artificial expansion of wealth on the stock market. In 1929 this false market collapsed. Its fall ended the prosperity of the Jazz Age; the music and dancing stopped. The Great Depression began and the decade of the thirties saw poverty and desperation in America and throughout the world.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, which captured the spirit of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He went to Princeton University but left to join the army and then spent most of his time writing his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Published when he was 24, it was a great success. That year Fitzgerald married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and began a life that was like one of those described in his books. This was the start of the Jazz Age, a period after World War I when America was booming and people tried to live as if life were one long party. It was an age of new freedoms, new music, short skirts, new dances and wild, unconventional behaviour.

The Fitzgeralds, with other carefree, rich Americans, often went to France for the pleasures of Paris and the French Riviera. Fitzgerald wrote other novels and many short stories to pay for his glamorous, expensive lifestyle, Zelda – herself a writer and a painter – became mentally ill, and Fitzgerald began to drink, increasing their need for money. He described his struggles to save Zelda and to overcome his own problems in The Crack-Up.

After the economic crash in America in 1929, when banks and businesses went bankrupt, Fitzgerald lost his popularity, and sales of his book slumped. Zelda was now in a mental hospital and Fitzgerald got a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood, living there, almost unknown, until he died at the age of 44.

• The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding