The Great Gatsby's characters fall into distinct social categories. The "aristocracy" are the inhabitants of fashionable East Egg; the nouveaux riches reside in West Egg; the lower class struggle in the Valley of Ashes. Nick rents an "eyesore" in West Egg. His romantic interest, Jordan Baker, lives with an aunt in the City and grew up with Daisy Fay Buchanan in St. Louis. Jordan moves easily among the established gentry of East Egg and the parvenus of East Egg.

Tom and Daisy Buchanan are members of the landed gentry. Their riches go back a number of generations. Tom is a graduate of Yale, who moved to East Egg from Chicago "in a fashion that rather took your breath away." Whereas the fancy automobile is associated with the parvenus of West Egg, Tom arrived from the posh Lake Forest suburb of Chicago bringing with him a string of polo ponies. He brags to Gatsby, "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable. . . but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage."

The Buchanans' tastefully elegant home is just one of "the white palaces of fashionable East Egg [that] glittered along the water." It is a "red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay", a place where "people played polo and were rich together." Fitzgerald devotes considerable description to lawn and grass areas, the color of which bespeaks money. Lush lawns are found in both Eggs, and we learn that Gatsby first laid eyes on Daisy in Louisville, where "the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house."

Separated from elegant East Egg by a "courtesy bay," West Egg was "the less fashionable of the two" even though it was a mansion neighborhood. Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby's dwelling emphasizes its recent construction and questionable taste. "It was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden."

In stark contrast is the land of the have-nots, "a valley of ashes a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens." This is where Tom's mistress Myrtle lives with her husband George, a gray, dust-covered man who blends into the cement color of his office's walls.

Nick is a Yale classmate of Tom's but his family was not of the same upper class. His home is an "eyesore" wedged between colossal West Egg mansions. Jordan lives with her aunt in New York City

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