Prohibition's Impact on Fitzgerald and Hemingway's Novels
This essay examines how the era of Prohibition influenced the major works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two authors whose writing is deeply intertwined with the culture of drinking. Drawing on The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and other works, the paper argues that alcohol functions not merely as a lifestyle detail but as a symbol of social hypocrisy, class inequality, and contempt for conventional American morality. Gatsby's bootlegging empire, Hemingway's hard-drinking protagonists, and the authors' own personal relationships with alcohol all reflect a shared disillusionment with a society that outlawed drinking while practicing it freely.
- Introduction: Alcohol and the Lost Generation: Both authors wrote under Prohibition; alcohol central to their work
- Gatsby, Bootlegging, and the American Dream: Gatsby profits from bootlegging to pursue social respectability
- Class, Criminality, and Social Hypocrisy in The Great Gatsby: Society drinks Gatsby's liquor while scorning his origins
- Hemingway, War, and Alcohol as a Sacred Substance: Hemingway frames alcohol as essential defense against modern hypocrisy
- Drinking as Masculine Identity and Feminine Defiance: Hemingway's characters use drinking to prove strength and independence
- The Darkness Behind the Glass: Limits of Alcohol's Role: Both authors acknowledge alcohol's darker, avoidant dimensions
- Conclusion: Prohibition as a Mirror of American Society: Prohibition exposed America's refusal to confront its own contradictions
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What makes this paper effective
- It uses well-chosen direct quotations from the primary texts — including Gatsby's boyhood journal and the famous "sacred, glorious, and sacrifice" passage from A Farewell to Arms — to anchor its literary claims in specific textual evidence.
- It connects literary analysis to historical context, showing how Prohibition as a social policy shaped both the subject matter and the symbolic meaning of alcohol in these novels.
- It draws a consistent parallel between both authors, moving naturally from Fitzgerald to Hemingway while maintaining a unified argument about alcohol, hypocrisy, and disillusionment.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic literary analysis supported by secondary scholarship. By citing Decker's academic article alongside primary textual evidence, the essay models how to integrate a critical source to reinforce an interpretive claim — in this case, Gatsby's identity as a "self-made man" enabled and ultimately undermined by Prohibition-era criminality.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis linking both authors' signatures themes to the historical reality of Prohibition. It then devotes its longest section to The Great Gatsby, moving from Gatsby's bootlegging to questions of class and social hypocrisy. It shifts to Hemingway's treatment of war, masculinity, and alcohol as a cultural marker. A brief comparative passage addresses both authors' personal relationships with drinking. The essay closes by acknowledging the darker dimensions of alcohol in both bodies of work before returning to its central claim about Prohibition as social critique.
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.
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