Gatsby’s Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904–1929

Inspired by the repeated references in The Great Gatsby to the title character as having attended Oxford, Snyder (The Making of Middle-earth), a professor of European history at Mississippi State University, vividly recreates the people and places Gatsby might have encountered during his brief stay there, in 1919. The book posits that Fitzgerald, himself on record as being infatuated with Oxford University, created a character modeled on the many young Americans who passed through the university following WWI, as Gatsby claims to have after his military service in France. Snyder demonstrates that Fitzgerald read examples of the then-popular Oxford novel, in which a young man comes of age there, including Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, and draws portraits of some notable Oxford-linked writers of the time, such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. For the last, he compares that author’s epics of medieval heroism to Fitzgerald’s fascination with the chivalric ideal, explored indirectly in The Great Gatsby, and directly in an unfinished historical novel set in ninth-century France. Snyder’s captivating study offers a fresh reading of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece as a novel about the American Dream, wrapped in medieval colors. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident. (Apr.)