The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
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Learn more about the 1920's with these fun and informative videos!
"The decade of the 1920s is often characterized as a period of American prosperity and optimism. It was the "Roaring Twenties," the decade of bath tub gin, the model T, the $5 work day, the first transatlantic flight, and the movie. It is often seen as a period of great advance as the nation became urban and commercial (Calvin Coolidge declared that America's business was business). The decade is also seen as a period of rising intolerance and isolation: chastened by the first world war, historians often point out that Americans retreated into a provincialism evidenced by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the anti- radical hysteria of the Palmer raids, restrictive immigration laws, and prohibition. Overall, the decade is often seen as a period of great contradiction: of rising optimism and deadening cynicism, of increasing and decreasing faith, of great hope and great despair. Put differently, historians usually see the 1920s as a decade of serious cultural conflict."
Full Text of The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Top Ten Quotes
1) Nick, on Gatsby: "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men".
2) Daisy, on her newborn girl: "All right...I'm glad it's a girl. And Ihope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool".
3) Nick, on himself: "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known".
4) Nick, on Gatsby's idealization of Daisy: "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion".
5) Gatsby, on Nick's assertion that he can't repeat the past: "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can".
6) Nick, on Tom Buchanan: "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind...".
7) Tom Buchanan, on Gatsby: "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out...".
8) Nick, on Gatsby: "They're a rotten crowd....You're worth the whole damn bunch put together".
9) Nick, on the Buchanans: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made".10) Nick, on resilience: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".
