The Great Gatsby has long been celebrated as the archetypal American novel, and its influence on later writers from J.D. Salinger to John OHara cannot be overestimated. Fitzgerald looks deeply into himself and his milieu to create the story of James Gatz, a self-educated nobody from Kentucky who has amassed a fortune and adopted the persona of Jay Gatsby, an Oxford-educated man about town, for the sole purpose of winning back the heart of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth. Daisy is now married to Tom Buchanan a brutal, ignorant racist who embodies the corruption that can come with unlimited wealth. As Gatsby, Daisy and Tom play out the drama in a small Long Island town, Fitzgerald makes it clear that life is meaningless when it is based on money and glamour at the expense of the solid American values of self-reliance and hard work.