II. About the Novel

2.1    The Creation Background of The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and did not receive many positive responses from critics and readers until 1950s. The revival of interest in Fitzgerald is a cultural phenomenon. Many critics began to pay much attention to it. In 1925 , it was hard for people to treat the writer seriously who portrayed the young, the beautiful and the rich as dehumanizing and damned，and who implied that the American dream turned sour. A rereading of The Great Gatsby strikes the readers with not only its large assimilation of the twenties era but also its great influence on the following years.
The Great Gatsby, the third novel of Fitzgerald is a great success which has established his reputation as a promising novelist in the circles of literature. His novel The Great Gatsby, foresees the doom and failure of the post-war years or the “roaring twenties” in which he lived. T.S. Eliot, who was never a hasty or extravagant critic, praised the novel was the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.
2.2     The Writer—F• Scott Fitzgerald
F•Scott Fitzgerald, was born on September 24, 1896, in an Irish family in St. Paul, Minnesota, which stands in the American Middle west. His father was an unsuccessful businessman, his mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant. The author’s own life experience helped him to write those novels, which reflected the American social life of that era. He is well known for his novels and short stories of America’s Jazz Age during the 1920s. He was regarded as the representative figure of the “Jazz Age”—the satisfaction of every material desire and the success—an “Age” between the end of World War I and the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1930s. In 1913 he went to Princeton University, which was one of the most prestigious and traditional American universities. There he was a leader in theatrical and literary activities, and became a friend of John Peale Bishop, who tutored him in the poems of Keats, Shakespeare, and French poet Paul Verlaine, and took part in the Triangle club, which was his stage and musical-comedy world. Fitzgerald, nevertheless, was unhappy in the university, especially when he felt uneasy and inferior to what he called “straight 1850 potato famine Irish” to those students who were born rich and born fashionable Easterners. He left college in 1917 because of academic deficiencies and enlisted in the army, serving as a lieutenant at a staff headquarters, at that time the United States enters World War I. In 1919, Fitzgerald went to New York in order to make a fortune. There he worked in an advertising agency but earned not much.
In 1920, he quitted his job in New York and returned to St. Paul. In the same year he finished and published his first novel, This side of Paradise. The work was finished under the influence of the works of the famous English writers, such as Oscar Wilde and modern writer James Joyce, expressed a new generation who got “lost” after World War I and the romantic yearnings of its Jazz Age which was applied to the 1920’s and was named by Fitzgerald himself. 《了不起的盖茨比》中的黛西形象解读(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_18614.html