【正文】 ions and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s love, As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of fortyfour. Fitzgerald was most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of properity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and 7 consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution(1919), mde millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”secret clubs that sold liquor thrived. The chaos and vilence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extrvagant living to penste. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade wer turned on their ear, as money, optlence, and exuberance became the order of the day. Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick, Ftitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised. Lehan, Richard D. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Craft of Fiction.[C] Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,1966. 2. If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay, said Gatsby. You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock. Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her