Nick Carraway is a young man from Minnesota who,goes to New York City to learn the bond business because his dad was in it. He is honest, tolerant, and does not judge people. Nick also is very trustworthy and gives peopl their space or privacy when they need it. Nick is Daisy's cousin, he tries to the rekindling of the romance between her and Gatsby. He is very mellow and down to earth. He has a thing for Jordan Baker. In their relationship, Jordan is like the man and Nick is like the woman. Nick is a passover and can sometimes be paranoid and very cautious.



Jay Gatsby is a very wealthy young man who lives in West Egg. He is known for his parties he throws every Saturday night, but no one knows where he comes from, what he does, or how he made his fortune. Many people spread enormous rumors about him; some people say that he's a criminal and others say that he's good looking, a ladies man, and mysterious. He cares a lot about Daisy and will do anything in his power to get a second chance to talk to her again. He and Daisy had a thing in the past. Throughout the whole years that have passed he has been keeping an eye out on Daisy and collected various amounts of newspaper articles about her.



Tom Buchanan is Daisy’s wealthy husband. He is well built and comes from a socially solid old family. Tom is an arrogant, hypocritical bully, and he likes to put people down. He's a racist and a sexist. He never considers trying to live up to the moral standard he demands from those around him. He does not care as much about his mistress Myrtle as she does about him; but he does care for her more than he does about his wife Daisy.(www.cinema.com/film/6077/great-gatsby/cast.phtml)

The Women Of Gatsby

Daisy Buchanan is a beautiful young woman from Louisville, Kentucky. She is Nick’s cousin and the object of Gatsby’s love. She is also Tom Buchanan’s wife. Daisy was extremely popular among the military officers stationed near her home, including Jay Gatsby. She made love with Gatsby before he left to the war. To Gatsby, Daisy represents the paragon of perfection she has the aura of charm, wealth, sophistication, grace, and aristocracy and that first attracted him to her. In 1919 she married Tom Buchanan, a young man from a solid, aristocratic family who could promise her a wealthy lifestyle and who had the support of her parents. She is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, bored, and sardonic. Daisy is in love with money, ease, and material luxury. She is also a really big Drama Queen.



Jordan Baker is one of Daisy’s close friends, she’s a woman that Nick becomes romantically involved with. She’s a very competitive golfer, Jordan represents one of the “new women” of the 1920s; cynical, boyish, and self-centered. Jordan is beautiful, but also dishonest; she cheated in order to win her first golf tournament and continually bends the truth. She’s a very independent women and speaks her mind. She loves to drama and likes to gossip and that’s one reason why her and Daisy are best of friends.


Myrtle Wilson is Tom’s lover, whose lifeless husband George owns a run-down garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle herself possesses a fierce vitality and desperately looks for a way to improve her situation. Unfortunately for her, she chooses Tom, who treats her as a mere object of his desire. Tom was her first love, so she desperately loved him. And sometimes her big mouth gets her in trouble because she doesn’t know when to be quiet. (www.novelguide.com/thegreatgatsby/characterprofiles.html)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born September 26 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota he was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald . His nationality is American but his ethnicity is Irish. Fitzgerald’s given names were from his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. His father’s name was Edward and he was from Maryland and his mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul and they were both Catholics. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy the first thing he wrote was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen. (http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/fitzgeraldbio.html)

In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, it was near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre; she was the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The war ended just before he was about to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement. He then quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html)

When he went to France in 1924, he wrote The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, showing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income. The Great Gatsby was about the 1920s and the time of flappers and successful rich people. Fitzgerald made little progress on his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled “The Boy Who Killed His Mother,” “Our Type,” and “The World’s Fair.” During those years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior became increasingly worse. Her condition got worse and she had to go to the hospital. In 1948 there was a horrible fire in the hospital and she died in the fire. In 1939, he had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html)

Jealousy

Jealousy is a universal emotion that everyone goes through. It is an emotion that can cause many people to make unwise decisions. There are chemicals that initiate this emotion there are called neuropeptides. A neuropeptide is absorbed into the cell which then gives rise to the feeling of that emotion. Jealousy is a resentful envy of someone else’s success, achievements, advantages, etc. For example a person can get jealous of someone’s relationship with their partner because it is very successful and perhaps they haven’t had a successful relationship. It can also over take a person and there are times when they are not fully conscience when it happens. (www.calmhealthworks.com/)


They can not completely control their actions. It causes them to snap and get really paranoid. Many people get very insecure and take their anger out on their friends. Also known as the “Green Monster”, everyone becomes this monster at one point in their life. When they do many people do not want to be around them and because of this it can also make them lose their closest friends and the respect from their loved ones. They feel as if other people don’t deserve to get good things that the whole world should revolve around them. (www.allaboutlifechallenges.org/what-is-jealousy-faq.htm)


But there are times when jealousy is not all bad. A healthy jealousy needs to be developed in family and love relationships. This type of jealousy is a protective fight to maintain your relationships. For example would you sit by while a person seduces your spouse or deceives your child? No, you would fight for them. This can also comfort your spouse or child to let them know that you care. But for the most part it can be bad what we need to do is balance it out to where it is at a healthy level. (www.allaboutlifechallenges.org/what-is-jealousy-faq.htm)

Prohibition began in January 16, 1920 when the 18th Amendment went into affect. The Federal Prohibition agents (police) were given the task of enforcing the law. Even though the sale of alcohol was illegal, alcoholic drinks were still widely available at "speakeasies" and other underground drinking establishments. There were over one hundred speakeasies in just one state. There were also a lot of smugglers who smuggled alcohol also known as “Bootleggers”. (http://www.1920-30.com/prohibition/)

While prohibition was in affect it limited amounts of wine and hard cider were permitted to be made at home. Many people did not care and did it anyway. There were some people who believed that Whiskey helped with health problems; so some doctors prescribed people with it for “health issues”. The labels clearly warned that it was strictly for medicinal purposes and any other uses were illegal, but even then doctors wrote prescriptions and drug-stores filled them without question. (http://history1900s.about.com/od/1920s/p/prohibition.htm)

This increased the number of "patients" dramatically. Many people were supposedly getting sick or “Whiskey Fever”. There was no attempt was made to stop this practice, so many people got their alcohol this way. Over a million gallons were consumed per year through freely given prescriptions. So eventually they put an end to the Prohibition of alcohol and people continued their ways of drinking as they wanted. (http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1017&full=1)

The 1920's

The 1920s had a lot of ups and down. A good thing that happened was the creation of new technology like the radio and the first talking movie. Many families used to listen to the radio for news, music and entertainment;since there were no tv's yet.It gave families a chance to bond and spend time together. When president Roosevelt was running for president he would talk to America throught the radio and they felt that they knew him on a more personal level and that one him his presidency. The first film that had sound was in 1920.Many people would go to the movies and watch the "talkies".

Many Americans in the 1920s were very rich and successful and there was good amount of entreprenuers. It was the year of opportunties and many people owned their own businesses. Many people went to parties and danced and loved music. Along this time out came the music Jazz. It was an up-beat type of music with harmony. Most Americans thought it was an outrage and that it brought out the start of Flappers. Flappers were girls who bobbed their hair, wore a lot of makeup, and wore short dresses.They drank and smoked a lot; so to end it they banned alcohol; but this did not last long.

The happiness and success did not last long though. Mainy people bought stock on the stock market. Many people were borrowing money from the banks and heard that banks were closing and everything was going downhill so they pulled their money out of the stock market causing it to crash. After the crash of the stock market many people became unemployed and had no money left in the banks. Some even had to sell their personal belongings to make ends meet for their family. In conclusion, the roaring twenties was a desperate time for Americans.

Mafia & Gangsters of the 1920s

In the public eye, the 1920s gangster and bootlegger "above the law" lifestyle brought money, fame, nice clothes, women, cars, and homes. Along with the flashy suit, the twenties also gave us the best dressed and most famous gangster of all time: Al Capone. The 20's most famous gangsters were: "Scarface" Capone, "Lucky" Luciano, "Bugs" Moran (AKA Jack "Legs" Diamond), and "Dutch" Schultz.

The 1920s plays host to many other organized criminals with expensive suits and flashy names. And every famous gangster has a colorful name to go along with his fine suit. The Cassic Gangster fashion was as popular with men as the women who adore him. It's also been said that the gangster, as the American public sees him, is a creation of the mass media. Gangsters became feared and respected within their neighborhoods. The 1920s gangsters could earn a good living from the public like a strong-arming their neighborhoods for small but widespread price increases for groceries and services, then skimming their profits from the providers of these goods. The 1920s gangsters became the American icons of the self-made-man.

With the passage of prohibition in 1919, the twenties marked a huge shift in the way gangsters went about their everyday business. During this time the Gangsters would open up speakeasies or secret underground clubs were peolpe who drink can go to these speakeasies and drink, dance, and have a good time with their friends. Bootlegging became huge business for the most successful gangsters of the era. In conclusion, the Gangsters of the 1920s were the first ones to start the Mafia and to smuggle in illegal alcohol and drugs during the prohibition.