
Tom Buchanan (born 1892) was an American businessman from Long Island, New York.
Biography[]
Tom Buchanan was born into a wealthy family in Chicago, Illinois in 1892, and he later moved East to study at Yale University alongside Nick Carraway. He did not fight in World War I, instead living off of his family's fortune, and he married Daisy Fay, the former girlfriend of Jay Gatsby. Buchanan was an abusive husband, both physically and emotionally, and he often spent his time playing polo or golf at his lavish estate in East Egg, Long Island, New York, or going to New York City with his mistress Myrtle Wilson. He was also deeply racist, reading the book The Rise of the Colored Empires, which led him to believe that non-whites would soon outbreed whites, and that whites and blacks would inevitably marry and create mixed-race children, threatening the white "master race". In 1922, Fay and Gatsby reunited, and they resumed their affair with Carraway's help. After Buchanan confronted Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan and angrily sent Fay back to Long Island in Gatsby's car, Fay accidentally killed Myrtle Wilson in a car accident. Buchanan stopped by the scene of the crime and also found Myrtle's body, and he assumed that Gatsby had been behind the wheel; he told her husband George B. Wilson that Gatsby had killed her, and told Wilson that something had to be done about a person like Gatsby. The next day, Wilson went to Gatsby's mansion and killed Gatsby in a murder-suicide, and Buchanan, shaken by the events, attempted to be a better husband to Fay, while Carraway returned to the Midwest, having become disenchanted with the East Coast.