The happy twenties
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Transcript of The happy twenties
The happy twenties in the USA
The Great Gatsby
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was a time of great social change. From the world of fashion to the world to politics, forces clashed to produce the most explosive decade of the century. In music, the three sounds were jazz, jazz, and jazz.Youth ruled everything. From the young styles of dress to the latest celebrities. If it was young, it was the thing.
Ads in magazines
The USA was very rich in those years.
Because of the war,
many countries owed it a lot of money.
It had plenty of raw
materials and plenty of factories.
The consumer society
The electrical industry also prospered. It made hundreds of refrigerators, vacuuum-cleaners, stoves and radios.
The motto of the people was “ Live now, pay tomorrow”.
Cars
American factories produced more goods
every year. The busiest were those
making automobiles. Between 1922 and
1927, the number of cars rose from 11 to over 20 million
The flapper lady
The skirt comes just an inch below her knees, overlapping by a faint fraction her rolled and twisted stockings. The idea is that when she walks in a bit of a breeze, you shall now and then observe the knee .
The era of Jazz and Charleston
The Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, contains many songs of the swing period and ragtime era.
The Charleston was a combination of swing, jazz and ragtime. The song was written by C. Mack and J. Johnson and was played at many speakeasies and parties like Gatsby’s parties.
Gangsters
In 1919 the American people voted in favour of the new Amendment to the Constitution. It was the Prohibition time.
Speakeasies , which were places where people could buy alcohol and dance all night, obtained their drinks from criminals called “bootleggers”. The best known gangster was Al Capone.
Fitzgerald’s biography
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is best
known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the
excesses of America’s ‘Jazz Age’ during the
1920s.
Fitzgerald’s youth
Born into a well-to-do family in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1826, Fitzgerald attended, but never graduated from Princeton University. Here he mingled with the monied classes from theEastern and this obsessed him for the rest of his life.In 1917 he was drafted into the army, but he never saw activeservice abroad. Instead, he spent much of his time writingAnd re-writing his first novel This Side of Paradise, which was published in 1920 and it was an immediate success. In 1920,He married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and together they Embarked on a rich life of endless parties.
The Great Gatsby
Dividing his time between America and Europe, the Fitzgeralds were also famous for their lifestyle.
He wrote The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922
and The Great Gatsby in 1925, which was considered his masterpiece.
Fitzgerald’s last days.
They had a child, Scottie, who was born in 1921. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic but he wrote sober.
Zelda had psychiatric treatment in the 1930s.
Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night in 1930. His last novel was The Last Tycoon.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940.
The Great Gatsby’s colour symbology-1
Green light Hope and dream(Daisy)
Envy, jealousy (money)
Yellow Death (Myrle’s death)
Corruptness (Leaves)
White Lack of responsibility, shallowness, purity
Red Death
Pink Mixture of red (desire, passion ,sin) and white (purity)
The Great Gatsby’s symbology-2
West Egg Newer Money
East Egg Fashionable. Old money
Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s eyes The eyes of God
Cars The symbol of materialism of the 1920s
Valley of Ashes Moral decay behind happiness and wealth
Flowers Refinement and love
The Great Gatsby and the American Dream
The American Dream was based on the assumption that each person, no matter what his origins, could succeed in life on the sole basis of his or her own skill and effort.
Fitzgerald seems to be critisizing the corruption of the American Dream. The characters pursue power and pleasure not noble goals.