51 items | 12 visits
Ms. Tunik's List: Fitzgerald
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Jun 24, 09
valley of ashes photo
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The American dream is a mythic structure underlying the founding of the colonies in America and the literature that emerged in the New World. In a sense, the concept has its origins in an essay written by John Winthrop aboard the ARBELLA in 1630. Soon to be governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop was pondering the nature of life in a new society, one filled with opportunity for social and financial advancement but one in which ambition had to be tempered with charity and decency, especially with regard to the poor. What his people needed, he argued, was the freedom to make the most of their lives based on the development of essential inner qualities, justice and mercy chief among them. He envisioned Boston as fulfilling the biblical vision of a "city on a hill" that would reward people who possessed the crucial virtues.
So was born the original American dream of boundless opportunity for material fulfillment as a reward for ambition, goodness of heart, and purity of soul, which is perhaps why Winthrop entitled his essay "A Model of Christian Charity." Such thinking lured immigrants from all the nations of Europe, offering the poor new possibilities, the oppressed freedom of expression, the downtrodden hope. A century later, Benjamin Franklin added to this ethic the idea of a disciplined life. In his posthumous AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1818), he revealed his boyhood program for personal advancement from utmost poverty to personal stature: a highly regimented day devoted to self-improvement through study, hard work, and the cultivation of social qualities. His outline quickly became the paradigm for social progress for millions of Americans, and in the 20th century F. Scott Fitzgerald used it anew in THE GREAT GATSBY (1925) as the protagonist's program for rising in the world.
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