F.Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda Sayre.
What was F.Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for The Great Gatsby?
I started reading the Introduction last night. I began to think that this book sounds like an interesting and slightly peculiar story. The main character, Gatsby, appears to be rich and to have the perfect life but still, to put it nicely, seems slightly insane. In the Introduction I learnt that Fitzgerald's ideas weren't completely unique. He modelled Gatsby off Trimalchio - a character from Satyricon by Petronius, a 1st century AD Roman writer. Trimalchio has a constant fear that there isn't enough time in the world. Gatsby adopted this strange trait. Funnily enough though, Fitzgerald was also time-conscious, apparently even when he was writing, he surrounded himself with clocks. Another similarity is that Trimalchio is obsessed with a green ball. It is on his floor but he never allows himself to touch it. Gatsby is like this with the green light. We later find this green light is at the end of Daisy, a past lovers, jetty. Even the location of the story has stemmed from something in Fitzgerald's life. In 1922 he moved to Long island. He lived in a modest house, or at least modest compared to what everyone else lived in. Similarly to that, Nick Carraway (the narrator of the story) lives in the plain, small house opposite Gatsby's grand, almost palace-like, home. Also, many of Fitzgerald's ideas are similar to that of the ideas in his other publishing's.
More info on F.Scott Fitzgerald: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL05VV040Ls
I started reading the Introduction last night. I began to think that this book sounds like an interesting and slightly peculiar story. The main character, Gatsby, appears to be rich and to have the perfect life but still, to put it nicely, seems slightly insane. In the Introduction I learnt that Fitzgerald's ideas weren't completely unique. He modelled Gatsby off Trimalchio - a character from Satyricon by Petronius, a 1st century AD Roman writer. Trimalchio has a constant fear that there isn't enough time in the world. Gatsby adopted this strange trait. Funnily enough though, Fitzgerald was also time-conscious, apparently even when he was writing, he surrounded himself with clocks. Another similarity is that Trimalchio is obsessed with a green ball. It is on his floor but he never allows himself to touch it. Gatsby is like this with the green light. We later find this green light is at the end of Daisy, a past lovers, jetty. Even the location of the story has stemmed from something in Fitzgerald's life. In 1922 he moved to Long island. He lived in a modest house, or at least modest compared to what everyone else lived in. Similarly to that, Nick Carraway (the narrator of the story) lives in the plain, small house opposite Gatsby's grand, almost palace-like, home. Also, many of Fitzgerald's ideas are similar to that of the ideas in his other publishing's.
More info on F.Scott Fitzgerald: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL05VV040Ls
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