When people look back on the history of this country there is no doubt in anybodies mind that The Great Depression was one of the hardest time periods in our history. During the Great Depression the body of American withered and withered and almost died. But one thing that most people do not seem to realize is that the spirit of America had been dead the whole time. It had been dead since the previous decade. And nothing shows that the American dream had gone bad better than the literature of the time.
One of the best novels of that time period and also one of the best novels in American literature, the Great Gatsby, shows the corruption of the American dream. In the book, the main character, Jay Gatsby, has built a large amount of wealth for himself. On the outside it looks like he is living the American dream, rising from nothing to something. But as you read the book, you see that it was not by legal means that he had earned his wealth. Pressure from the upper class had made him decide that wealth by illegal means would allow him to be accepted by the rich.
