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thousand dollars” (107; ch. 6), promised to the twenty-three-year-old Gatsby in Cody’s will, went instead, through some “legal device that was used against him” (107; ch. 6), to Cody’s companion, Ella Kaye. Gatsby is also, in a sense, cheated out of Daisy Fay when Tom marries her while Gatsby is still overseas after World War I. Fitzgerald’s hero perseveres, however, in his pursuit both of fortune and of Daisy, and before the novel closes he attains both goals. Finally, the role of the lesser hero who helps the Alger hero in some way is played by Nick Carraway, and the role of the businessman-father figure is played by Dan Cody, as we saw above, and by Meyer Wolfsheim, who “raised him up out of nothing” (179; ch. 9) when Gatsby returned penniless from the war. Perhaps the most pervasive vehicles for the ideology of the self-made man were the McGuffey Readers, a series of elementary school books used to teach reading, which were a dominant force in American education from the midnineteenth century to the early 1920s. The stories and poems contained in the Readers extol the same virtues promoted by the success manuals of the period: honesty, hard work, kindness, and the avoidance of alcohol and bad company. In addition, like the success manuals, Horatio Alger novels, and other texts that circulated the discourse of the self-made man, the Readers illustrated the belief that success is a product of good character. For example, a poor boy receives a job because the old man he has kindly helped cross the street turns out to own his own business. Or an orphan boy is adopted by a wealthy man because he has resisted the temptation to steal the man’s gold watch. As we have seen, Gatsby has many traits in common with the self-made hero, of which McGuffey’s protagonists are just another version. And the job Gatsby receives from Dan Cody, which serves as his introduction to the world of finan‑ cial success to which he has always aspired, is the product of the good deed he performed in rowing out to Cody’s yacht to warn him of an impending storm, just as the success of McGuffey’s boys is a product of their good character. Finally, there is a startling resemblance between Gatsby’s early life and the for‑ mative years of America’s most famous self-made millionaires, the oft-told stories of which were another way in which the discourse of the self-made man circu‑ lated. In The Robber Barons (1934), Matthew Josephson details many of the com‑ mon experiences shared by such self-made millionaires of the late nineteenth century as Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, James Hill, John Rockefeller, and Jay Cooke. Although Josephson is not interested in liter‑ ary analysis and makes no comparisons with The Great Gatsby, the similarities between the life stories Josephson narrates and the biography of Jay Gatsby are too striking to be ignored. Born into poverty, “most of these young men,” Josephson notes, “left the paternal shelter early in youth, to wander alone and make their own way. . . .
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