Fitzgerald began to work on the Great Gatsby, a novel about a man who (Like himself) loves a girl who is from a richer family, and who sacrifices his whole life in order to try and win her love. Gatsby is from the Mid west, from a poor family, but he tries to improve himself and make money. Then like Fitzgerald he goes into the army, and he does serve in Europe during the War. He meets Daisy Fay - a Southern Belle, whose family think he’s not rich enough or grand enough for her. Daisy seems to return his love but she is volatile and swayed by her family. While Gatsby is posted off to service in France, she marries Tom Buchanan, a rich member of the WASP elite.
They live abroad for a couple of years and have a daughter and are distantly related to Nick Carraway, the narrator of the book.
When Nick moves to New York, he rents a cottage on Long Island, and starts to work in the bonds business. He reconnects with Daisy and her husband, but he is bewildered by their marriage which seems to be in trouble. Tom is a former college athlete, not very clever, who has racist and right wing views. Tom also has a mistress, a working class married woman called Myrtle Wilson whom he takes to New York and invites Nick to join them on their pleasure excursions.
Nick being a Mid Westerner from “provincial conservative America” is a little shocked by Tom’s behaviour. He can see that Daisy is unhappy. She has a friend, Jordan Baker, a well to do society girl who plays in golf tournaments. He notes that there were rumours of Jordan cheating at her games, but he feels that “dishonesty in a woman” is not of much importance. In the early part of the novel, he is fascinated by the morals or lack of them of postwar America and New York, later he will become more moralistic. He has travelled some distance mentally from his family in the West, who had made a comfortable fortune from a business, which was based on solid goods and services. However the bonds business is a new area of work. He is learning about it as he goes along and is aware of its strangeness and fragility, and that it is not related to real life work and business. It is about the manipulation of money and selling bits of paper…and it will lead to the Wall St Crash at the end of the 20s.
The book is a short one but the plot is complicated. Nick finds that his neighbour is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who holds parties in his fancy mansion every weekend. He has all sorts of people at them, actresses, society people. Nick wonders about him, as noone seems to know the source of his wealth. Its rumoured that he’s a bootlegger or that his money has come from some other dubious source. He and Nick are similar in that their money comes from something that noone understands.....
Nick finds that Jay is using him to get to meet with Daisy, and that Daisy was the girl to whom he was engaged, when he was posted down south during the War. Jay went on to serve in France, but on returning to America, he found that Daisy had broken with him and married Tom Buchanan. He still loves her and wants her back.
Since Daisy left him because he was not wealthy or blue blooded, he acquires great wealth and creates a party social lifestyle in hopes that he will be able to attract her back and make her love him again.
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