Essay from the year 2019 in the subject American Studies – Literature, Southern Connecticut State University, language: English, abstract: The main originality of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre lies in the fact that the American writer was a representative of the ‘Jazz age.’ Fitzgerald not only described an entire era, fixing it in various literary works, but he himself became its ‘cultural hero’; he showed the ambiguity of the ‘American dream’ phenomenon. The novel The Great Gatsby shows that pursuit of American dream forgetting about its original foundations, about moral values, and even own personality leads to moral degradation, frustration, and the destruction of false illusions.