<P> Fitzgerald's visits to Long Island's North Shore and his experience attending parties at mansions inspired The Great Gatsby's setting . Today, there are a number of theories as to which mansion was the inspiration for the book . One possibility is Land's End, a notable Gold Coast Mansion where Fitzgerald may have attended a party . Many of the events in Fitzgerald's early life are reflected throughout The Great Gatsby . Fitzgerald was a young man from Minnesota, and, like Nick, who went to Yale, he was educated at an Ivy League school, Princeton . Fitzgerald is also similar to Jay Gatsby in that he fell in love while stationed far from home in the military and fell into a life of decadence trying to prove himself to the girl he loved . Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant and was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama . There he met and fell in love with a wild 17 - year - old beauty named Zelda Sayre . Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her preference for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success . Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich . In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald's attempt to confront his conflicted feelings about the Jazz Age . Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised . </P> <P> In her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2013), Sarah Churchwell speculates that parts of the ending of The Great Gatsby were based on the Hall - Mills Case . Based on her forensic search for clues, she asserts that the two victims in the Hall - Mills murder case inspired the characters who were murdered in The Great Gatsby . </P> <P> In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War from the Midwest--who serves as the novel's narrator--takes a job in New York as a bond salesman . He rents a small house on Long Island, in the fictional village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious multi-millionaire who holds extravagant parties but does not participate in them . Nick drives around the bay to East Egg for dinner at the home of his cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan, and her husband, Tom, a college acquaintance of Nick's . They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, an attractive, cynical young golfer . She reveals to Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the "valley of ashes," an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City . Not long after this revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom and Myrtle to an apartment that Tom uses like a hotel room for Myrtle, as well as other women whom he also sleeps with . At Tom's New York apartment, a vulgar and bizarre party takes place . It ends with Tom physically abusing Myrtle, breaking her nose in the process, after she says Daisy's name several times, which makes him angry . </P> <P> Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties . Nick encounters Jordan Baker at the party and they meet Gatsby himself, an aloof and surprisingly young man who recognizes Nick because they were in the same division in the Great War . Through Jordan, Nick later learns that Gatsby knew Daisy through a purely chance meeting in 1917 when Daisy and her friends were doing volunteer service work with young officers headed to Europe . From their brief meetings and casual encounters at that time, Gatsby became (and still is) deeply in love with Daisy . Gatsby had hoped that his wild parties would attract an unsuspecting Daisy, who lived across the bay, to appear at his doorstep and allow him to present himself as a man of wealth and position . </P>

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