Dissillusionment in a drifting society: A study of Anthony and Gloria Patch in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned"

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most exciting and significant writers in American fiction. He is exciting because it ms through his personâl «yenence that he Vrote about the 1920s, and significant because he coined a name to this decade, "The jazz Age," and very realistically reflected the -carefree and gay spirit of the era while successfully interpreting the subsequent moral deciine and disillusionment ofitsyouth. Fitzgerald wrote in his autobiographica! piece "Echoes of the Jazz Age,,x that the Jazz Age began "about the time of the May Day riots in 1919."2 This glittering decade that ended with the Great Depressiort on 24 October 1929, was probably the most prosperotıs in the history of the American nation. The legendary prosperity of this decade is not an artificial or mythical one, but it is real in the sense that the nation's gross national product (GNP) in 1929 was sixty-two per cent higher than that in 19143. İn other words, an economic prosperousness had föllowed the trying years of the fîrst World War.