In two paragraphs with quotes, explain how F. Scott Fitzgerald has portrayed a social group in a particular way. How might the contexts of the author have influenced his portrayal of these social groups?

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows that people born to wealth and privilege are insensitive to the needs of others, self-centered, and cynical in pursuing their own desires. The two people that most completely fit that category are Daisy and Tom Buchanan. Daisy is born into a comfortable life in a large white house with loving parents. By the time she is seventeen, she has pretty clothes, many admirers, and her own car. Part of what attracts Gatsby to her is the "smell" of money she exudes: she is a person who has never known the insecurity of financial want. Tom comes from an even higher social class than Daisy. He is immensely wealthy because he has inherited a vast amount of money. He even owns his own string of polo ponies. Yet these two characters, because they have always been pampered and cared for, are remarkably insensitive to the needs of others. Quotes that support this idea include:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .

I have included the earlier part of this famous quote, in which it is explained that Tom feels he was justified in leading George Wilson to kill Gatsby, because it reflects the upper-class mindset that Fitzgerald is trying to convey. All throughout the novel, too, Tom is stringing Wilson along, pretending to want to sell him a car as a cover for seeing his wife, Myrtle. Tom's arrogance and insensitivity come out in the following:

The voice [Tom's] in the hall rose high with annoyance. "Very well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all . . . I’m under no obligations to you at all . . . And as for your bothering me about it at lunch time I won’t stand that at all!"

The poor, on the other hand—like George Wilson and the people described in the contemporary song lyrics of the 1920s that Fitzgerald carefully interweaves into the novel—may live and love sincerely, but they are ground up by their harsh lives. While Fitzgerald might focus on the wealthy lives and fabulous parties of the Jazz Age, he never loses sight of this society's less fortunate. George, for example, upset at learning of Myrtle's infidelity, reports saying to her, with no cynicism:

God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!

Tom and Daisy are far too cynical to hold such simple beliefs. They survive, and George ends up poor and dead. Further, an example of a song lyric that shows an awareness of the poor is as follows, printed in all caps:

THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET—CHILDREN.

Fitzgerald's context is his awareness of the huge divide between rich and poor in the 1920s world he inhabited and his own rise from a middle-class background to wealth and fame. You will be able to find more examples of the contrast between rich and poor throughout the novel.