-Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business.
-Rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area
-Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby
-lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night

-Decline of the American Dream
-a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole
-American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess
-era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure
- resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals
-The Hollowness of the Upper Class
-portrays the newly rich as being vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and taste

-referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age
-characterized by the rise of radical political movements
- Eighteenth Amendment: established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring the production, transport and sale of (though not the consumption or private possession of) alcohol illegal
-Flappers: a "new breed" of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior
-Bootleggers: illegal traffic in liquor in violation of legislative restrictions on its manufacture, sale, or transportation

-wrote The Romantic Ecologist, Winter Dreams, The Crack Up
-his goal in life was to always be better than he was
-dreamed of going to Princeton, then flunked out
-dreamed of the process of becoming, not being
-distrusted the rich
-went into the service

-the opportunity and freedom for all citizens to achieve their goals and become rich and famous if only they work hard enough

-Trimalchio in West Egg
-Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
-Gold-Hatted Gatsby
- On the Road to West Egg
-The High Bouncing Lover