Jay Gatsby, born James Gatz, is the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, an enigmatic, self-made millionaire who hosts lavish parties at his Long Island mansion and is rumored to have earned his fortune through illegal bootlegging during Prohibition. Gatsby's entire reinvention of himself, from poor farm boy to glittering socialite, is driven by his obsessive love for Daisy Buchanan, a woman he courted years earlier and now hopes to win back despite her marriage, treating their lost past as something that can be purchased and restored through wealth and spectacle. Narrated by his neighbor Nick Carraway, Gatsby's story of self-invention, longing and eventual destruction became the defining literary parable of the corrupted American Dream in the Jazz Age. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountTitle character and tragic romantic, a self-invented millionaire pursuing a lost love 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountRelentless, self-mythologizing pursuit of a past he cannot actually reclaim, embodied in his devotion to Daisy Buchanan 1 Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account Connections
Character In
Source Jay Gatsby (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Jay Gatsby (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a Long Island mansion where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States.
- Character In: The Great Gatsby
View the Source Frequently Asked Questions
Was Jay Gatsby based on a real person?
Partly. F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed to a Long Island neighbor, Max Gerlach, and drew on his own youthful romance with Ginevra King.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is known to have annotated a 1923 newspaper clipping about a Long Island bootlegger named Max Gerlach with the note "this is the man", and Gerlach, like Gatsby, styled himself as a self-made man of mysterious origin who threw lavish parties. Gatsby's doomed devotion to Daisy Buchanan also draws on Fitzgerald's own early romance with Ginevra King, a wealthy Chicago debutante whose family is thought to have discouraged the match because Fitzgerald was not rich.
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