Historical Context
The Roaring Twenties was the nickname of the 1920s economic boom in the United States. It was a time of rapid industrial growth through mass production, most famously Ford's automobile plants, rising incomes and the beginnings of consumerism. The prosperity began in the aftermath of World War I and lasted until the stock market crash in 1929.
West Egg in The Great Gatsby mirrors the new-rich affluence that also arose through unbridled stock market speculation and the illicit bootlegging income which financed Gatsby's extravagant jazz parties.
The combination of excessive speculation, unstable banking and credit conditions led to an unequal distribution of wealth. Poor garage owners like the Wilsons were excluded from the American Dream of upward mobility and self-made riches. The boom ended abruptly through murder in the novel and the Great Depression in society.
Literary background
Fitzgerald wrote within the broader movement of literary Modernism and shared affinities with the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusion and scepticism after the Great War. These were US expat writers, many in 1920s Paris, among them Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Dos Passos.
Modernist traits in the novel include ironic narration, nonlinear chronology and a focus on subjective perception, rather than the linear plots and omniscient moral voice of tradition. Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” became the archetype where surface detail implied deeper emotion and readers have to infer what is omitted. That restrained narration often produced irony and emotional distance where events are reported plainly and the gap between action and feeling is experienced as alienation. A cynical, world-weary tone unifies the literature’s preoccupation with loss, rootlessness, and the search for authenticity.
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