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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Weaving literature and history, Snyder (The Making of Middle-earth: A New Look Inside the World of J.R.R. Tolkien) here takes a new historicist approach, presenting a social history of Oxford and its influence during the Jazz Age, which he connects to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Building on Fitzgerald's interest in the "Oxford novels," a type of bildungsroman, Snyder explores the often unexamined role of the university in Gatsby's life and in the novelist's consciousness. Accounts of writers such as T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, W.B. Yeats, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien about their time at Oxford emphasize its importance as a premier university for study and making connections. Of particular interest is the role of the Rhodes scholarship in bringing students, especially Americans, to Oxford beginning in 1903, many of whom returned home to become educational reformers and societal leaders. VERDICT Through extensive research, Snyder has succeeded in revealing Oxford in all of its medieval glory and the hold it had on Fitzgerald's creativity. Recommended for scholars and general readers interested in a unique explication of The Great Gatsby and an informative cultural history.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.