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

Answer 8

Strict code of expectation
Wharton got a divorce in 1913 and moved to France
Immigration
Few rich families ruled society = Wharton’s family
‘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.

Question 9

Gilded Age wealth

Answer 9

This period inflated the wealth of many famous names in American business = Rockkefeller + 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*