The original story of the Great Gatsby appeared in the mid-1920s in a novel written by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story mainly focuses on millionaire Jay Gatsby's hopeful efforts to make his dreams come true. The theme of the novel was pursuing happiness and achieving dreams by working hard to acquire the golden tool, money, to do so. Many adaptations have been created highlighting the importance of this classic work of American literature. Five of these adaptations were films released in 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000 and the last one in 2013. Looking at the years in which these adaptations were created, one can definitely realize that the theme of the novel does not only represent the era of its time, the 1920s, but it also exposes one of the fundamental principles of American culture, the American dream, and examines its influence on Americans in subsequent eras as well. The latest of the adaptations is the 2013 film The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and others. This film is a modernized production of The Great Gatsby that details Fitzgerald's plot in an updated spirit; it is a contemporary representation of the illusion of the American Dream that people are still gripped by today, the illusion that material prosperity can lead them to their dreams and, consequently, to maximum happiness. The ideal of the American Dream is as old as the first appearance of colonists in the New World. Among them was a group of separatists fleeing persecution from the religious church in England. In 1620, led by William Bradford, they established a government by signing the Mayflower Compact. The Mayflower Combat united all those colonists who believed that no one could command them and therefore, as William Bradford wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation, they would “use