Is the only real way to achieve the American Dream through crime or inheritance?

The Great Gatsby is a novel about how the American dream is fast becoming the American nightmare due to its misguidance and people trying to achieve it through any means possible. The hard work ethic and honesty we saw in Ragged Dick no longer exists and Fitzgerald suggests to his readers that the only way to achieve the American Dream in the 1920s is through crime or inheritance.

Gatsby is only able to buy all of the material items he owns because he inherited $25 000 from a man who saw potential in him. He then continues to be make money only through criminal activities such as bootlegging.

Although this idea of crime/inheritance making you rich was dominant in the 1920s there is still evidence that some of the richest people in the U.S today made their money through criminal activity or inheritance. For example social networking Facebook which was valued at approximately $84 billion earlier this year, was an idea stolen by “founder” Mark Zuckerberg who is reportedly worth $13.5 billion. The whole site was created by Zuckerberg based on an idea that came from someone else, surely this is stealing and makes it criminal? Apparently this criminality does not matter and Zuckerberg at age 27 ranks 52nd Forbes World’s Billionaires list.

Inheritance is still another way people become rich and supposedly achieve the American dream. Just like criminality this is still evident in contemporary U.S society, maybe even more so than in the 1920s. The worlds richest women, Christy Walton inherited her husbands money when he died in a plane crash in 2005. Her husband's family were the founders of Wal-Mart and today Christy is worth $26.5 billion thanks to this. She repeatedly appears on rich lists despite none of the money actually being earned by her.

From these examples we can see that inheritance and more commonly criminality still dominant American society and the people who achieve wealth through these means are said to have achieved the American dream. Which raises the question, what is the American dream? Is it just about being rich as these examples and The Great Gatsby suggest it should be? Or is it more individualised than that? Despite Gatsby obtaining wealth he still is not happy, his American dream is evidently Daisy and being rich did not help him achieve his dream. If anything it was the downfall of his dream. I believe that there is not one collective American dream. It depends on who you are and where you came from. As Fitzgerald suggests through The Great Gatsby the American dream became misguided and people forgot its actual meaning resulting, in what is now for a lot of Americans, the American Nightmare.