The American Dream is generally interpreted as the romantic assumption that, in a land where all are created equal, any person willing to strive for a goal is limited only by the intensity of his or her dedication to self-improvement. It began long before Jefferson penned his Declaration containing the self-evident truths involving equality and the rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

To the earliest settlers, America was a land of hope with infinite resources and opportunities. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, has Nick Carraway describe Manhattan as "the old island . . .that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes a fresh green breast of the new world."

The early colonies fell short of Utopian dreams, but the inhabitants were able to practice their religion of choice and seek spiritual fulfillment. In terms of material goods people like Ben Franklin looked beyond the vast and fertile plains to the betterment of human nature. Again, Fitzgerald's novel connects backward in time from the Roaring Twenties to the birth of the country. Gatsby was a student of Franklin's success maxims that aimed at moral perfection.

Franklin's scheme of daily employment called for rising at 5; Jimmy Gatz's "GENERAL RESOLVES," found on the flyleaf of a Hopalong Cassidy book, read "Rise from bed 6.00 A.M." The rest of Jimmy Gatz's schedule of activities, amusingly modernized and particularized, parallel Franklin's enumerated virtues. The order of succession shows that Fitzgerald must have written this section of his novel with Franklin's Autobiography open at his elbow.

In the mid-nineteenth century, literary renderings of the American Dream had turned from individual perfectibility to social reform. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth address the problem of slavery, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is an assertion of faith in a nation's ability to recover from the tragedy of Civil War and move forward. Even the lighthearted tales of humorists like Josh Billings and Davy Crockett deal with the same concepts of self-reliance and individuality treated seriously in the essays of Emerson and Thoreau.

Along with Fitzgerald, the writer most often associated with realization of the American Dream is Horatio Alger. Though not memorable for literary artistry, Alger's rags-to-riches books epitomizing the fame and fortune lying in wait for poor boys who exhibit bravery, diligence and clean living sold over two million

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