The American Dream Between Reality and Illusion
The American novel of the 1920s explored the mixture of experimental excitement about the new and anxious awareness of historical loss. F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly express this epoch and subsequently became the representative of this decade in the literary field. Fitzgerald is also a novelist of immersion, deeply knowing the dreams of these years and fully understanding the meaning of “The American Dream”. But, as the title of his own novel The Beautiful and Damned suggested, there was a darker side of this earthly paradise, therefore almost all his writings, from The Great Gatsby to Tender is the Night have a touch of disaster in them. The author knew how to express the driving forces behind all the glittering social display and also to stress upon the psyche of this very specific age of economic overextension.
Keywords: American novel, modernism, literary influence, „Jazz Age”, „The American Dream”.
