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What decade is the setting of The Great Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is set in the summer of 1922 in the fictional New York areas of West Egg and East Egg. The 1920's in America were considered the Jazz Age (the music became popular in that decade), and Fitzgerald is widely accepted as the great chronicler of those times. The 1920's was a time of prosperity in America, but it was also a time of corruption, decadence and speculation. The 1920's ended with the stock market crash of 1929 and America was thrown into a deep and dark economic depression. Fitzgerald reflects this combination of prosperity and decadence in his novels and stories, most particularly in the opulent wealth of Jay Gatsby, who flaunts his riches with lavish parties.


It's interesting that Fitzgerald was one of very few great American writers of the time who chose to write about what was happening in America in the 1920's. Others such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos and Ezra Pound became expatriates, choosing to live in Europe during that decade. Hemingway, a friend of Fitzgerald, totally ignored what was going on in America and focused his fiction on portraying his childhood past, his experience in World War I and his present life in Europe. Other writers such as William Faulkner and John Steinbeck chose to ignore the excesses of the 1920's to focus on more regional concerns. Possibly only Sinclair Lewis, in his novel Babbitt, rivaled Fitzgerald in his social critique of America at that time.  

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