US Context

Question 1

Gatsby’s parties

Answer 1

Based on the impressive parties thrown by Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World
— truthful experience = Laskow: “out of the whole book, he [Fitzgerald] only marked three chapters as ‘an invention’.” = truthful expereinces

Question 2

Dust Bowl

Answer 2

Black Sunday Storm = 14 April 1935 — severe dust storm as a part of the dust bowl — estimated to have displaced 300,000 tons of topsoil - the upper layer of soil

Question 3

Ban on GoW

Answer 3

Banned in Kern County in California
Congressman of Oklahoma: it “exposes nothing but total vulgarity … of the author.”

Question 4

Articles before GoW

Answer 4

‘the Harvest Gysies’ = 1936 – TGoW 1939 —- criticises the government, but offers solutions such as farms gaining small patches of land

Question 5

Immigration

Answer 5

20 million immigrants arrived to the US between the 1880s and the 1920s
The Homestead Act 1862 drew Easterners to the Plains as they could claim a patch of land

Question 6

Economic failure

Answer 6

The Wall Street Crash 28 October 1929 — The Great Depression
Industrial production in the US declined by 47% in the first year of the depression
GDP fell by 30%
The unemployment exceeded 20% at its highest level
Roosevelt’s New Deal began to solve things + WW2 vs. Hoover = Do-nothing President — Hoovervilles
= Works Progress Administraion created in 1935 enabled the hiring of 8.5 million people

Question 7

The Age of Excess

Answer 7

The Boom Years + The Roaring Twenties
Assembly line pioneered by Henry Ford + Model T Ford
26 million cars on the road by 1929
vs. More than 60 per cent of Americans lived just below the poverty line = Valley of Ashes
Flappers = liberated women — e.g. Jordan Baker as a golfer [masculine sport stereotypically]
Prohibition 1920
1924 Immigration Act = quota-based which prioritised white European immigrants
Ku Klux Klan by 1925 had 4 million members

Question 8

Gilded Age + wealth

Answer 8

• Strict code of expectation vs. Wharton got a divorce in 1913 and moved to France
• Few rich families ruled society = ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ about her father’s family = were a very wealthy and socially prominent family having made their money in real estate
• She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for The Age of Innocence
• This period inflated the wealth of many famous names in American business = Rockefeller + J.P Morgan = ‘Captains of industry’ or ‘robber barons’ for their exploitive industrial practices
• Between 1860 and 1900, 2% of American housholds owned roughly 1/3 of the nation’s wealth