Gatsby's Oxford

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby{u2015}war hero and Oxford man{u2015}at the beginning of the Ja... (more)

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby{u2015}war hero and Oxford man{u2015}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. 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 and the years of recovery to 1929, the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. This period is interpreted through the pages of The Great Gatsby, producing a vivid cultural history. It shows just how much Fitzgerald, the quintessential American modernist author, owes a debt to the medieval, the Romantic, and the European historical tradition. (less)