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

by Christopher A Snyder

Overview

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby—war hero and Oxford man—at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

A diverse group of Americans came to Oxford in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Jazz Age—when the Rhodes Scholar program had just begun and the Great War had enveloped much of Europe. Scott Fitzgerald created his most memorable character—Jay Gatsby—shortly after his and Zelda’s visit to Oxford. Fitzgerald’s creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford.

Beginning in 1904, when the first American Rhodes Scholars arrived in Oxford, this book chronicles the experiences of Americans in Oxford through the Great War to the beginning of the Great Depression. This period is interpreted through the pages of The Great Gatsby, producing a vivid cultural history. Archival material covering Scholars who came to Oxford during Trinity Term 1919—when Jay Gatsby claims he studied at Oxford—enables the narrative to illuminate a detailed portrait of what a “historical Gatsby” would have looked like, what he would have experienced at the postwar university, and who he would have encountered around Oxford—an impressive array of artists including W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643131092
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christopher A. Snyder is Founding Dean of the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University and Professor of European History. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of eight books, including The Making of Middle-earth: A New Look Inside the World of J.R.R. Tolkien, following seven years of research at Oxford, where he has lectured American honors students since 2007. Dr. Snyder also lectures frequently at the Smithsonian Institution and has appeared on the History Channel, Discovery, the National Geographic Channel, and the BBC. He lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

For rights inquiries, please contact Christopher Snyder's literary agent:

Mark Gottlieb
Literary Agent
Trident Media Group
[e-mail]
[phone]
https://www.tridentmediagroup.com/?
Christopher A. Snyder is the Founding Dean of the Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University and Professor of European History. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of eight books, including The Making of Middle-earth: A New Look Inside the World of J.R.R. Tolkien, following seven years of research at Oxford, where he has lectured American honors students since 2007. Dr. Snyder also lectures frequently at the Smithsonian Institution and has appeared on the History Channel, Discovery, the National Geographic Channel, and the BBC. He lives in Starkville, Mississippi. For rights inquiries, please contact Christopher Snyder's literary agent: Mark Gottlieb Literary Agent Trident Media Group [e-mail] [phone] https://www.tridentmediagroup.com/?

Table of Contents

Map Of Oxford Ca. 1919 ix

Glossary Of Oxford Terms xi

Preface xv

1 Jay Gatsby: An Oxford Man 1

2 "Our Young Barbarians All At Play": Oxford From Percy Shelley To Oscar Wilde 18

3 "Old Sport": The First American Rhodes Scholars 49

4 "Modish Negroes" And Mr. Wolfsheim: Alain Locke, Horace Kallen, And Cultural Pluralism 74

5 An American At Merton College: T. S. Eliot, Garsington, And The Women Of Oxford 100

6 Major Gatsby In Trinity Quad: Oxford And The Great War 119

7 The Castle And The Grail: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, And Modern Medievalism 144

8 "A Meadow Lark Among The Smoke Stacks": Oxford And Princeton 179

9 Scott And 2Elda, Meet The Churchills 199

10 England's Jazz Age: Evelyn Waugh And The Bright Young People 220

11 Dreaming In Oxford 249

Appendix A Oxford Writers, Ca. 1829-1929 261

Appendix B A.E.F. Soldier-Students At British Universities, 1919 265

Bibliography 267

Endnotes 283

Acknowledgments 325

Image Sources 329

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2019

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

Library Journal

01/07/2019

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"A triumphal tour de force of intellectual, cultural, biographical, and emotional historicism, Dr. Snyder accomplishes the rarest of reading pleasures. Epic and yet page-turner spritely, Gatsby’s Oxford transports the reader to the most enchanting, enduring, and unique artistic slice of life at the sui generis institution, populated with transformative Great Thinkers."

Mary Matalin

"Christopher Snyder explores our enduring fascination with Oxford, the ‘City of Dreaming Spires,’ through the lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his iconic fictional alter-ego, 'Oxford man' Jay Gatsby. Skillfully weaving biographical and literary excerpts, Snyder offers fresh insights into Scott Fitzgerald and the pre-WWI Oxonian literary giants who inspired him—from Shelley and Yeats to Ruskin to Wilde. A fascinating look at the impact of one remarkable place and its medieval and Romantic traditions on the imagination and literature of Britain and the United States."

Susan Jaques

"Snyder exhaustively uncovers the lives, longings, and enchantments that gave the world Gatsby. This is a must read for anyone interested in how western culture renewed itself in the wake of the unfathomable horrors of the Great War."

Brian Boeck

"This is a deeply researched, highly detailed, and scholarly historical study in which Christopher Snyder has explored F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary creation, in his most celebrated novel, of Jay Gatsby in Oxford. He has done so against the historical background of the first quarter of the twentieth century—a period stretching from the beginning of the Oxford Rhodes Scholar program, through the horrors of World War I to the end of Prohibition, the Jazz Age—when Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and many other leading American literary and intellectual figures came to, and were enchanted by, Oxford, the City of Dreaming Spires, a period and ambience which Dr. Snyder describes and evokes so vividly in these pages."

Dr. Tudor Jones

"Entertaining and informative. [Snyder’s] work of popular scholarship reminds us that The Great Gatsby more than lived up to Fitzgerald’s initial intention to ‘write something extraordinary and beautiful and simple.’"

Michael Dirda

Christopher Snyder explores our enduring fascination with Oxford, the ‘City of Dreaming Spires’ through the lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his iconic fictional alter-ego, 'Oxford man' Jay Gatsby. Skillfully weaving biographical and literary excerpts, Snyder offers fresh insights into Scott Fitzgerald and the pre- and post-WWI Oxonian literary giants who inspired him—from Shelley, Yeats, and Ruskin to Wilde, Tolkien, and Waugh. A fascinating look at the impact of one remarkable place and its medieval and Romantic traditions on the imagination and literature of Britain and the United States.

Susan Jacques