The Olympian Cars: The Great American Luxury Automobiles

The great American novel of the 1920s was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It tells the story of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby and other socialites in New York City in the 1920s through the eyes of a midwestern man named Nick Carraway. There are over 200 mentions of cars or uses of language associated with the automotive world in The Great Gatsby, which is a relatively short book. Many scholars have discussed the symbolism behind the cars in The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s universe. Cars were an important part of the Jazz Age and in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald mentions only two cars by make: Nick’s Dodge and Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce. Gatsby drives a Rolls-Royce, which were as extraordinarily expensive then as they are today. Nick describes the car as cream, but it is often referred to as bright yellow throughout the novel. Nick describes it: “A rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns.” Tom Buchanan, on the other hand, calls it a “circus wagon.” Garage owner George owns a “dust-covered wreck of a Ford.” Daisy Buchanan drove a “white roadster” in her youth and her husband Tom drives an “easy-going blue coupé,” brand unknown. Fitzgerald himself drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost at the time he was writing the book.

Go ahead, buy the book, old sport.