F. Scott Fitzgeralds Personl Influences on The Great Gatsby

â€Å"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.† (Fitzgerald, 1925). The Great Gatsby is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925, and takes place in 1922. The novel greatly exemplifies the time period that it takes place in, known as â€Å"The Roaring Twenties† or â€Å"The Jazz Age†. One way of exemplification is prohibition and the Volstead Act. According to David J. Hanson from Potsdam.edu, the Volstead Act, which took place in 1919, established National Prohibition of alcoholic beverages (Hanson, 2013). Fitzgerald made his characters Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby very similar to himself. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald too was in love with a girl of a higher social class. She had money, and he didn’t. Daisy told Gatsby that rich girls don’t marry poor boys, so he went and made some money and got rich, then went back for Daisy. Both of them had a ‘golden girl’ that lik ed them, but wouldn’t marry them because they had no money. They both fell in love with their golden girl while stationed in the military. Fitzgerald wrote his book in order to make money to impress his soon to be wife, Zelda. He didn’t even want to sign a deal with the publishers to make a percentage of the profits, he just took some money up front and let the publishers keep all the money that the book made. Nick Carraway is also similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Carraway, Fitzgerald believed that people on the East Coast had lost all of their