Gatsby at Trinity College Oxford
On March 25, 2025, the IDA held its annual conference at Trinity College, Oxford. The gathering was dedicated to exploring new research into Jay Gatsby’s Oxford connections – research that has significantly reshaped the understanding of The Great Gatsby. Central to the event were the findings of IDA founder Roger Michel and Trinity Archivist Clare Hopkins, who argued that Robert P. T. Coffin, a Rhodes Scholar and later Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, was a real-life inspiration for Fitzgerald’s enigmatic hero.
Their research (read more in The Telegraph) highlighted a series of remarkable parallels. Like Gatsby, Coffin came to Oxford after serving in the First World War on a scholarship program for demobilized American officers. Fitzgerald’s novel includes unusually precise references to Gatsby’s time at Oxford – playing cricket, posing for photographs beneath Trinity’s archways, glimpsing the “dreaming spires” – all details that align closely with surviving images and records of Coffin at Trinity. Coffin’s physical description, his seafaring Maine background, and his talent for self-fashioning likewise closely track elements of Gatsby’s portrayal.
Equally striking is Coffin’s connection to Fitzgerald himself. The two overlapped at Princeton, lived in the same dormitory, and shared membership in the elite Cottage Club. Michel argues that Fitzgerald and Zelda’s 1921 visit to Oxford almost certainly brought the men back into contact, offering Fitzgerald firsthand insight into the real-life experiences of a former American serviceman at Oxford – knowledge reflected with surprising accuracy in Fitzgerald’s novel.
The March 2025 conference also featured an exhibition of photographs, paper ephemera and books relating to Coffin’s time at Trinity. These materials, drawn largely from the Trinity college archive, helped illuminate an entirely new – and historically well-grounded – dimension of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.