The America Dream is defined as the ideal that every US citizen should have equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. To Fitzgerald, it had a different meaning. After watching his father loose his job and his family loose their wealth as a child, he defined the American Dream as doing better than your parents, and even than yourself, but he also understood that economic success would not be the same in real life as it was in dreams.

The Roaring Twenties was a time of economic boom in the United States. It is characterized by great excess and spending. This is the era of the flapper, where women moved away from traditional standards and focused on enjoying themselves. The Roaring Twenties was a time in which people defied Prohibition, by going to speakeasies, indulged in new styles of dancing and dressing, and rejected many traditional moral standards.

Fitzgerald's time at Princeton, in which he was an outcast, had a great impact on his writing. He experienced a microcosm of society, the caste system with the wealthy elite at the top. When his first novel was published, This Side of Paradise, he became extremely popular and was thrusted into a life of luxury. He and his wife moved to New York where they received an inside view to the lives of the wealthy elite. Then, when, the Great Depression hit, he lost his fortune and returned to the lower class. Fitzgerald used his experiences and insights into both the elite class and the lower class to write his dynamic novels.

A majority of Fitzgerald's works surround the topic of wealth and richness. He covers the lives of the elite and the caste system that surrounds the class. It is not enough to just be wealthy, you must also come from a respectable family. Fitzgerald, also, analyzed and explored themes of regret and maturity in a way that ties into the excess and wastefulness of the elite class.

The novel, The Great Gatsby, analyzes the conflicts between the elites of old money and the nouveau riche, those who recently made their money. This is mostly exemplified by the contrast between East Egg, where those who have old money live, and West Egg, where the nouveau riche live. This comparison is also seen between the characters of Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. Finally, we see the theme of regret as Gatsby longs to rewind and go back to a time when he still had his first love, Daisy.

Gatsby exemplifies the self-made man described by the American Dream. He was raised by a poor family in the Midwest and worked hard to earn his economic and social status. He also experiences the prejudice of the old rich towards the nouveau riches.