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In The Great Gatsby, who is the author, and what do you learn about him that helps you understand why he wrote this book? What is his motivation?...

The author of The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are many connections that exist between the writer and the text. Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to an Irish Catholic family. His mother, Mollie, was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, while his father, Edward, who doted on his young son and taught him to be a gentleman, had trouble with success. Like Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald saw his father as a failure. Fitzgerald's mother made sure he attended elite private schools (with the financial support of her parents), which put the young middle class boy in the midst of wealth at an early age. This made Fitzgerald ambitious like Gatsby. However, Fitzgerald's dream was to become a wealthy and celebrated writer rather than a powerful businessman.


When Fitzgerald met a young woman named Ginerva King, it's said that her father did not approve of her dating him, because he was far beneath her social class. Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby was certainly an out-of-reach person for Jay Gatsby. Later on, Fitzgerald met a southern belle named Zelda Sayer, whom he became enamored with before he left to fight in World War I. After returning from the war, Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda. This life experience is similar to Gatsby's first meeting with Daisy. The pair meet in Louisville, Kentucky, before Gatsby is shipped off to the war. Daisy is a popular girl with the men around her, just as Zelda Sayer is said to have been. Zelda accepted her engagement to Fitzgerald but broke it off when she realized that he might not be able to earn enough money to support her lifestyle. This shows that perhaps Zelda's ideals were shallow like Daisy’s in the novel. For example, Gatsby knows he must become wealthy in order to be acceptable in Daisy’s eyes. When Fitzgerald sold his first book and gained fame, Zelda became his wife. He won his love (unlike Jay Gatsby).


Fitzgerald is also like the narrator, Nick Carraway, the middle class man with a connection to wealth through family ties (the author’s mother and her family likely brought Fitzgerald within arm’s distance of societal acceptance quite a bit). Nick watches this world in a way Fitzgerald likely did, too. All in all, much of Fitzgerald’s life is reflected in The Great Gatsby. His motivation to write the novel perhaps came from a combination of experience, stories yearning to be told, and his need to comment on the changes happening in the world around him.

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