The Great Gatsby | Themes
Fitzgerald's ambitions as a writer paralleled those of his spiritual ancestors of the nineteenth century (Melville, Whitman, Thoreau), who rendered in imaginative literature the emergence of America as a nation. Like them, he believed in the capacity of the American people to perpetually rediscover the promise of America. Like them, he recognized that there was a continuous clash between the reality of life in the United States and a mythic vision of what it might be. But he felt that he was writing towards the end of a golden era, while they worked closer to its inception. Still, he...
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