The Great Gatsby Essay Prompts 1. The American Dream--as it arose in the Colonial period and developed in the nineteenth century--was based on the assumption that each person, no matter what his or her origins, could succeed in life on the sole basis of his or her own skill and effort. The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. What Fitzgeraldā¦
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