Money and Corruption in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald During the period in our country's history called the Roaring Twenties, society had a new obsession: money. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, people's attention was now focused on wealth and economic success. Many Americans would stop at nothing to become rich, and money was the new factor separating classes within society. Wealth was a direct reflection of how successful a person actually was and now became what many people sought to be, to be rich. Wealth became the new stability of the “American Dream” that people desired and chased all their lives. In the novel entitled The Great Gatsby, the ideals of the so-called American dream were distorted, due to the greed and desire of the main characters to become rich and wealthy. These characters placed in the novel highlight the true value that money has on a person's place in society, making wealth a state of mind. The heart of the whole notion of wealth lies in the novel's setting, the East and West eggs of New York City. . The West Egg was a group of "nouveau riche" or the newly acquired rich, and the East Egg was where people who inherited their wealth resided. The eggs divided the rich in two, while the poor were limited to the center, the "valley of ashes". The way the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes the two communities also exudes a feeling of superiority. Nick describes the East as "the less fashionable of the two, through this is a very superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them" (... middle of paper... your own personal idea of Gatsby's success may have been corrupted by greed, but that doesn't mean it survives now) striving for the true American dream of personal success. Works Cited Cohen, Adam. “Jay Gatsby is a man for our times” The Literary Cavalcade New York: September 2002. Vol.55, Iss.1; “Possession in the Great Gatsby” The Southern Review Baton Rouge: Spring 2001.Vol.37, Iss.2.Fitzgerald, F. Scott New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953Gibb, Thomas. "Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby" The Explicator Washington: Winter 2005. Vol. 63, p. 1-3 Sorvino, Mira and Stephens, Toby “Nothing great about this Gatsby.” The Washington Post. Washington, DC: January 13, 2001. Page. 1-2