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Yale ICF Working Paper No. 00-38 THE GREAT GATSBY: YALE, PRINCETON, COLUMBIA, HARVARD, OXFORD Ray C. Fair Yale University November 2000 This paper can be downloaded from Social Science Recearch Network at: /paper.taf?abstract_id=273248 The Great Gatsby: Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Oxford Ray C. Fair? November 2000 Abstract Where did Fitzgerald get the idea of having Clay’s Economics reside in Nick Carraway’s library? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the classics of American lit- erature. I, like many, ?rst read it in high school. A recent re-read, however, with the mature eyes of an economist, led me to the following passage, which I had somehow overlooked in my earlier days. While Jay Gatsby nervously awaited the arrival of Daisy in Nick Carraway’s house, he looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay’s Economics (Fitzgerald (1925, p. 89)). Clay’s Economics is an introductory economics text, written by the British economist Henry Clay, and this bit of free advertising piqued ?Cowles Foundation and International Center for Finance, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8281. Voice: 203-432-3715; Fax: 203-432-6167; e-mail: ray.fair@; website: . I would like to thank Sharon Oster for many helpful comments, Jennifer Nou and Emily Oster for superb research assistance, Billy Hitchcock for permission to examine his father’s record at Harvard, and many helpful librarians at the colleges listed in the paper’s title. It was Jennifer Nou’s idea to pursue the Tommy Hitchcock link, which alas led to no smoking gun. my interest as a textbook author. How did Fitzgerald happen to choose Clay’s Economics to reside in Nick’s library? In The Great Gatsby Nick is a Yale man, graduating in 1915. Since economic texts are seldom purchased for leisure reading, one might conclude that Fitzgerald meant Clay’s Economics to be the text that Nick used at Yale. So is it likely that Nick could have used Clay’s text at Yale? According to Yale catalogs of the time, in