Prohibition's Impact on Fitzgerald and Hemingway's Novels

Introduction: Alcohol and the Lost Generation

The consumption of alcohol defines the works of both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The quintessential Fitzgerald heroine is the flapper — the short-haired, carefree, hard-drinking woman of works such as Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. The iconic "Hemingway man" of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms was equally hard-drinking. It is deeply ironic that both authors came of age as writers during the era of Prohibition and published their most famous novels when drinking was technically illegal in the United States — "technically" illegal, despite the fact that the law was widely ignored.

However, this is no coincidence. Just as much as the Great War, Prohibition revealed the corrupt nature of modern society in the view of these authors, and that perception is reflected in the centrality of alcohol throughout their work.

Gatsby, Bootlegging, and the American Dream

This argument is perhaps most explicitly illustrated in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In Fitzgerald's most famous novel, the titular hero has made vast sums of money as a bootlegger after distinguishing himself fighting in World War I. Everyone knows what he has done, and while it is illegal, it is only tacitly acknowledged — society prefers to look the other way. Gatsby himself constructs a false persona of a man educated at Oxford, going so far as to order his shirts from abroad to project the image of a sophisticated man of the world: "I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition" (Fitzgerald, Chapter 4). Yet it is a lie — part of a project of self-improvement he began years earlier in the Midwest, where he grew up poor.

In the novel, "Gatsby appears in the guise of the archetypal, if somewhat misguided, self-made man" (Decker 52). He is self-made through criminality, but not necessarily a morally simple criminality, given that everyone around him — even the most ostensibly respectable characters — is equally "criminal" in their willingness to drink. Prohibition enables Gatsby to make a fortune in the tradition of the archetypal self-made man, but not in the way he truly desires. He can superficially live the American Dream — a dream that his poverty would otherwise have put beyond reach — yet he cannot purchase class.

Class, Criminality, and Social Hypocrisy in The Great Gatsby

People attend Gatsby's parties but disdain him personally, because they know he is not "old money" and that his gains are ill-gotten. They enjoy the fruits of his labor in the form of alcohol. "He's a bootlegger," said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass" (Fitzgerald, Chapter 4). In the same breath, the women sneer at Gatsby and drink his alcohol. They drink, but they do not need to defy the law to make their money — indeed, they do not even pay for the privilege, since Gatsby is all too willing to spend lavishly in order to attract fashionable society and draw Daisy back into his orbit.

No one else in the novel is shown profiting so dramatically from the opportunities of American capitalism as the gangsters do. Few legitimate opportunities exist for people like Gatsby who wish to transcend the boundaries of their birth. Gatsby did not want to be a gangster; he wanted to be respectable. This is evidenced by a journal he kept as a boy:

"General Resolves — No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] — No more smokeing or chewing — Bath every other day — Read one improving book or magazine per week — Save $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per week — Be better to parents" (Fitzgerald, Chapter 9).

Because of the unfairness of American society, men like Gatsby are branded criminals while brutish, prejudiced men like Tom Buchanan are deemed respectable simply because they inherited their wealth.

Although Gatsby's military service during the war is not prominently featured in the novel, there is a meaningful parallel between how he served his country and his behavior during Prohibition. No one wishes men to die, yet the actions of his country compelled Gatsby to serve. He did so honorably, yet gained no social currency as a result. Daisy still rejected him as insufficiently well-born or wealthy to be her husband. During Prohibition, the society Gatsby wished to impress demanded alcohol. Determined to earn the money that might win Daisy back, he became a bootlegger — and once again society refused to reward the accomplishment with respectability, offering only contempt for his newly made wealth.

Conclusion: Prohibition as a Mirror of American Society

Alcohol was, nevertheless, a necessary element for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway: it exposes the falseness of Gatsby's society and enables Hemingway's characters to endure an otherwise unlivable world. The era of Prohibition showed America's refusal to confront the truth about itself and about human nature. Even though the effects of alcohol were not purely good, the law that sought to eradicate it revealed, more vividly than almost anything else, the hypocrisy at the heart of American life — and both Fitzgerald and Hemingway made that hypocrisy the subject of their art.

Decker, Jeffrey Louis. "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28.1 (1994): 52–71.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. eBook.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants."

Rich, Frank Kelly. "Hemingway." Modern Drunkard Magazine. June 2004.