The Great Gatsby- background knowledge

I chose to read "The Great Gatsby" first because, to be honest, I have already read this in an previous English class. The only part I really enjoyed about the book was the ending, but we'll get to that later. "The Great Gatsby" was first written in 1925, the middle of the Prohibition Era, also known and "The Jazz Age." F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer of the "Lost Generation." (Basically a group of cynical writers with terrible lives who use irony or satire to describe the decay of morals in modern culture, even though they were utterly immoral themselves.) Fitzgerald emulates what I would assume to be the typical life of a "Great American Author;" he graduated college, went to war, had marital problems, found himself in debt more often than not, only had tastes of success, was an alcoholic. Pretty typical for a writer of the turn of the century. WWI really changed a lot of young men. They left a world of extreme traditional Paradox values, and came home to find tremendous controversy of ethics. The girls they left behind turned out to be libertines, following the new Flapper trends. I think Fitzgerald was bitter because he truly despised the lack of morality, and yet he found himself submerged in the very thing he stood against, which was the hidden meaning of the quote on pg. 2, "Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn." Fitzgerald was only as strong as his main character, Nick; he could not rise above the very thing he despised. I think Fitzgerald partially created an alter ego in Nick. Nick was "in between" when it came to the old and new ways, yet he found himself being as unlawful as the average guy in the time of Prohibition. In the end, Nick was still a good person and I do believe Fitzgerald still believed he had some decency in his disposition, despite his addictions and struggles. "The Great Gatsby" shows the decay of morals in everyone, whether of the old ways or new; it shows the irony of how in a world without ethics, the happiness or merriment is temporal, and in the end, only bitterness remains.