The “Roaring Twenties” were surrounded by the disillusionment of an economically sound America, which was sure to fall. American culture in the 1920s was centered on lost hope and unreachable dreams as shown by the lost generation and countless others struggling to become rich by both illegal and legal means. Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby depicts the time accurately with his characters and even more in depth with an iconic quote about Gatsby reaching out to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. All of the following real events are shown throughout the novel such as the war, prohibition and the new women’s movement. Without including these events and theme, Fitzgerald couldn’t have written a great American novel that connected with the historical 1920s.
The Great War involved all of the world’s superpowers and it pinned two factions against each other. American wouldn’t have gotten involved but the “Germans undertook overt acts against American lives” (Kennedy 696). The Allies side was composed of France, Russia and the United Kingdom at the start of the war. The opposing faction was called The Central powers, which included Germany and Austria- Hungary. As the war continued to grow, more countries joined in on the fight and America eventually joined the allies after Germany announced its decision to use unrestricted submarine warfare. The leader of the German regime, Hitler, had many lucrative goals he wished to achieve like the establishment of the Arian race. The war ended in 1918 and previous superpowers were now lost and struggling in poverty because of the large amount of spending. Germany, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary all lost their superpower status as a dominant nation in the world economy. Mill…
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…nity and limitless potential.
Works Cited
Behr, Edward. Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America. New York: Arcade Pub., 1996. Print.
Dorn, Rick, Susan K. Freeman, and Pamela Pennock. “Clash of Cultures.” Clash of Cultures. Knight Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 May 2014.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004. Print.
Kennedy, M. David, Thomas Bailey, and Lizabeth Cohen. “Chapter 30/ The War to End War and Chapter 31/ American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”” The American Pageant. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 696-745. Print.
McCartin, Joseph A. “Discontented America: The United States In The 1920S.” Journal Of American History 87.2 (2000): 712. Academic Search Premier. Web. 10 May 2014.O’Donnell, Jack. “Ladies of Rum Row.” Editorial. American Legion Weekly 16 May 1924: 3-8. OldMagazineArticles.com. Old Magazine Articles, 2005.
