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On the surface of The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald portrays a romantic love between a man and a woman, but inside the real meaning is much deeper. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as a time of decay social and moral values, evidence of this is the greed and the pursuit of pleasure. Jay Gatsby’s constant parties epitomized the corruption of the American Dream as the desire for money and worldly pleasures overshadowed the true values of the American Dream.

It’s written in the American Constitution that every individual has the right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. This right it seems has taken a twisted turn in the early 1920’s.

. These materialistic values consequently led the decay of the American Dream. The new American Dream described by Fitzgerald portrays a world where greed, the pursuit of money and pleasure are above all else. Fitzgerald portrays a world that has lost its way in the corruption of the American Dream.

the perception of the American Dream was that an individual can achieve success in life regardless of family history or social status if they only work hard enough.

Gatsby epitomizes the idea of self-made success; he is successful financially and socially and he essentially created an entirely new persona for himself from his underprivileged past. All of the wealth and status which Gatsby acquired, that while on the surface made his life appear to be the precise definition of the American Dream were actually elements which led to it’s demise.

“The culture of consumption on exhibit in The Great Gatsby was made possible by the growth of a leisure class in early-twentieth-century America. As the novel demonstrates, this development subverted the foundations of the Protestant ethic, replacing the values of hard work and thrifty abstinence with a show of luxury and idleness.” (Donaldson, 8)

"It does speak to contemporary America," says David Dowling, author of a students' guide, The Great Gatsby in the Classroom. "Especially that so-called American Dream, that stereotype that everyone can succeed if you try hard enough.

The American dream, like Gatsby's house in the end of the novel, is empty, or may never have existed.

the American Dream has transformed from a pure ideal of security into a convoluted scheme of materialistic power.

Jay Gatsby, who epitomizes the purest characteristic of the American Dream: everlasting hope.

depravity of the modern dream to wealth, privilege, and the void of humanity that those aspects create. Money is clearly identified as the central proponent of the dream's destruction; it becomes easily entangled with hope and success, inevitably replacing their places in the American Dream with materialism.

The American Dream, once revered as an attainable, an almost holy icon of American culture, now found itself subject to scrutiny. Gatsby exemplifies the man who obtains, at least for awhile, the outward trappings of financial wealth only to see the empire he envisions for himself ultimately fail to materialize.

His repeated emphasis on the theme of corruptive wealth—present even in the notes for the unfinished parts of The Last Tycoon—and his depiction of the melancholy implications in the dream of the social aspirer—these represent the core of his commentary on our experience.

There was also F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose masterpiece The GREAT GATSBY (1925) told of a man in search of the elusive bird of happiness, fatally beguiled by America's materialist Dream.

The color green represents not only Gatsby's dream of winning back the idealized Daisy but also the broader American dream. The valley of ashes that lies between Long Island and New York City

symbolize both the moral decay of U.S. society and the plight of the poor people (including Myrtle and her husband)

That this narrow aperture should grow from a heap of ashes and refuse suggests that in the triumph of the industrialized, commercialized, and banalized world to come, the American dream of open horizons and limitless possibilities would be reduced to a burned-out, undifferentiated mass.

Although the Dust Bowl included many Great Plains states, the migrants were generically known as "Okies," referring to the approximately 20 percent who were from Oklahoma. The migrants represented in Voices from the Dust Bowl came primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Most were of Anglo-American descent with family and cultural roots in the poor rural South.

Voices from the Dust Bowl illustrates certain universals of human experience: the trauma of dislocation from one's roots and homeplace; the tenacity of a community's shared culture; and the solidarity within and friction among folk groups. Such intergroup tension is further illustrated in this presentation by contemporary urban journalists' portrayals of rural life, California farmers' attitudes toward both Mexican and "Okie" workers, and discriminatory attitudes toward migrant workers in general.

era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties

newly rich as being vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and taste.

Fitzgerald's book mirrors the headiness, ambition, despair, and disillusionment of America in the 1920s: its ideals lost behind the trappings of class and material success.

In the end, it is inherited wealth and social standing that determine much more of one's destiny than is determined by talent and individual initiative

The yearning to bridge this gap is most persistently and most romantically evoked in Fitzgerald, of course, in characters like the former Jay Gatz of Nowhere, N.D., staring across Long Island Sound at that distant green light, and all those moony young men standing in the stag line at the country club, hoping to be noticed by the rich girls.

Some novels trade on class anxiety to evoke not the dream of betterment but the great American nightmare: the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom.

the notion that wealth and privilege are somewhat crippling conditions: if they don't make you an out-and-out twit, they leave you stiff, self-conscious and emotionally vacant until you are blessed with a little lower-class warmth and heart.