Gary Lee Kvamme

Gatsby's Big Apple Gary Lee Kvamme

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's third, and perhaps most famous novel, is considered one of America's most Zeitgeist novels. It is the quintessential novel to represent the Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald himself named the period, and it contains national symbols and preoccupations such as the expression of the American dream and the Prohibition period. Furthermore, it also beautifully portrays the Big Apple as the American city par excellence, a dazzling and growing metropolis that could offer its inhabitants all the entertainment they needed during the 1920s. It is the setting of The Great Gatsby-the summer of 1922 in New York-and the particular role of the Big Apple that I would like to analyze in this study.