The Great Gatsby Timeline

1902

1901

1899

Jordan Baker is born in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Great Gatsby Timeline

Daisy Fay is born in Louisville, Kentucky.

Dan Cody, Gatsby's mentor, buys his yacht the Tuolomee and starts sailing. He does this to get away from Ella Kaye, his estranged second wife.

"The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville."

Winter 1917-1918

By: Nevyn D'Souza

October 1917

Gatsby leaves for Europe to fight in WWI.

1890

Gatsby is stationed at Camp Taylor in Louisville, where he meets Daisy. They are together for a month, and he is shocked by how much in love with her he falls.

1892

1857

1851

Nick Carraway is born in a Midwestern city.

Jordan also meets Gatsby.

Nick 's great uncle starts the hardware business that his family owns.

“My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan”

James Gatz is born in North Dakota to Henry C. Gatz.

Dan Cody is born.

1906

1918

"the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today"

1915

Tom Buchanan is born to a very prominent family in Chicago.

Jordan becomes a professional golfer. She is later mired in a cheating scandal, but nothing is proven.

James Gatz works as a clam digger and salmon fisher on Lake Superior, and tries to go to St. Olaf Lutheran College in southern Minnesota before dropping out two weeks later unhappy to be working as a janitor to support himself.

Nick graduates from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and goes to fight in WWI.

"That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments"

"I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War."

Tom also graduates from Yale University.

January 1920

August 1922 part 1

1924

A reporter comes by to investigate the rumors about Gatsby.

Prohibition goes into effect through the passage of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed most kinds of alcohol. Prohibition spurs widespread underground organized crime (represented by Wolfshiem and Gatsby in the novel).

1914

Tom meets Gatsby again when Tom stops by Gatsby’s in the middle of a horseback ride.

April 1920

Nick writes the story about Gatsby and that fateful summer - this story is the novel that we are reading.

Tom and Daisy come to Gatsby’s next party, which Daisy hates.

September 1918

Daisy gives birth to Pammy, and the Buchanans move to France.

Gatsby and Daisy begin their affair; Gatsby fires his staff so that they wouldn't talk about the affair and he alsostops his parties.

World War I starts

1907

July 1922

Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s house parties and meets him. Also at the party is Owl-Eyes, the guest who enthuses about Gatsby’s library.

"The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in and then they came back to Chicago to settle down."

James Gatz, 17 years old, meets Dan Cody in Little Girl Bay on Lake Superior and changes his name to Jay Gatsby.

Nick starts a relationship with Jordan .

Daisy invites Nick and Gatsby for lunch at her house. She and Gatsby plan to reveal their love to Tom, but instead in the unbearably hot day, the group decides to go to Manhattan to the Plaza Hotel. There, Gatsby reveals the affair, and Tom reveals that Gatsby’s money comes from crime. Daisy is unwilling to completely renounce Tom, which decimates Gatsby. Daisy decides to stay with Tom.

Gatsby takes Nick out to lunch, where Nick meets Wolfshiem, and where Gatsby meets Tom.

November 1919

Gatsby fights with distinction in the Argonne Battle, and then is promoted to Captain and then to Major. He also receives several medals.

Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby and Daisy had been in love five years before.

"James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior"

1907-1912

Nick invites Daisy over for tea so that Gatsby can have a reunion with her and try to turn back time.

Gatsby returns to Louisville while Daisy and Tom are on their multi-month honeymoon.

Gatsby goes to New York and asks his future partner, Wolfsheim, for a job.

Gatsby sets sail with Cody for five years.

1921

November 1922

August 1922 part 2

The Buchanans move to Chicago, where Nick visits them for 2 days, then to East Egg on Long Island, New York.

On the way back from the hotel, Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, runs over and kills Myrtle. That night, Tom convinces Wilson that it was actually Gatsby who killed Myrtle. Also that night, Gatsby decides that he will take the blame for Myrtle’s death, and Nick and Jordan break up.

The next day, Tom and Daisy leaves town for good.

1910

Later that day, Wilson kills Gatsby and himself.

Completely disillusioned and horrified, Nick moves back home to the Midwest.

Myrtle marries George Wilson.

1912

October 1919

Spring 1922

July 2, 1922

1919

Meyer Wolfshiem fixes the 1919 World Series.

"I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe"

Tom starts an affair with Myrtle.

Dan Cody dies in Boston. He leaves $25,000 to Gatsby, but Ella Kaye uses legal means to take away this inheritance.

After Armistice, Gatsby goes to Oxford University in England for five months, in a program for army officers.

Tom takes Nick to meet Myrtle. They go to a Manhattan apartment, to a small party that ends with Tom punching Myrtle in the face for talking about Daisy.

September 1922

"It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I can't really call myself an Oxford man."

Gatsby is penniless but has learned polished manners and how the rich operate.

The murder-suicide is mischaracterized as the actions of a deranged grieving husband, and there is no mention of the Buchanans or of Myrtle’s affair in the police report.

1911

Gatsby’s father, Henry Gatz comes to the funeral from Minnesota.

June 1922

June 1919

Nick can’t find anyone else to come to the funeral. Even Wolfshiem refuses to come.

August 1919

Myrtle and Wilson moves into an apartment above a garage where Wilson works in the valley of ashes.

Nick decides to learn bond trading in New York. He rents a small house in West Egg, Long Island, next door to Gatsby’s mansion.

Tom has an affair with a chambermaid (Myrtle) during the honeymoon.

October 1922

Owl-eyes is the only other person who comes to the funeral.

Nick has lunch with the Buchanans, and meets Jordan Baker.

Despite some reluctance, Daisy marries Tom.

Nick sorts things out with Jordan.

Nick and Tom go to Yale University.

"That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken—she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel."

Nick has a brief relationship with a woman from Jersey City.

Nick runs into Tom in Manhattan, where Tom confesses to telling Wilson that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle.