ABSTRACT
When Fitzgerald broke onto the American literary scene in 1920, he was only twenty-four and had published a very few short stories. Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published in 1922. Through the events of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows the ineffective rationale that 'privileged' beliefs those held by not only Tom and Daisy but also by Jordan and Nick provide for modern Americans. No critic denies that it was the contextual trappings of Gatsby's life that first attracted readers. Before people recognized the study of anthropology or the social sciences, Faulkner was compiling an archive of Southern stories. William Faulkner spent nearly fifteen years of his life writing poems. The list runs, privileging Thomas Wolfe as number one, creating a 'splendid magnificent book' as he tried to 'put the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin'.
