Gatsby

Jay Gatsby, born James "Jimmy" Gatz, is the fictional title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best known work, The Great Gatsby (1925). The character has become an archetype of self-made American men seeking to join high society, and in the U.S., the name has become synonymous with those successful businessmen who have had shady pasts.Seventeen-year-old James Gatz hails from rural North Dakota where he was born to a poor German American farming family in 1890. He despises the limitations of poverty so much that he drops out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota only a few weeks into his first semester. He later explains to narrator Nick Carraway that he could not bear working as a janitor to support himself through college any longer. Soon afterward, he meets Dan Cody, a copper tycoon who becomes his mentor and invites him to join his ten-year yacht trek from Girl Bay. Gatz begins going by the name Jay Gatsby and, over the next five years, learns the ways of the wealthy. Cody leaves Gatsby $25,000 in his will, but after his death, Cody's mistress cheats Gatsby out of the money.In 1917, during his training for the infantry in World War I, 27-year-old Gatsby meets and falls in love with 17-year-old Daisy Fay, who is everything he is not: rich and from a patrician Louisville family.

During the war, Gatsby reaches the rank of Major, commands the heavy machine guns of his regiment, and is decorated for valor for his participation in the Marne and the Argonne. After the war, he—as he tells Nick Carraway years later—attends Trinity College, Oxford.[1][2] While there, he receives a letter from Daisy, telling him that she has married the wealthy Tom Buchanan. Gatsby then decides to commit his life to becoming a man of the kind of wealth and stature he believes would win Daisy's love.[3]

Gatsby returns home, which is being transformed by Prohibition, an era in which "all the old boundaries that separated the classes were being broken, and a new wave of instant