The Lifting Gales of Spring tells the stories of the eighty students from Australia who attended Harvard University, from the first student to enroll at Harvard Medical School in 1876, before Australia was a country, through the end of World War II, after which Australian contacts with Harvard dramatically increased. It includes Steve O'Donnell, a boilermaker from Sydney who became a boxing instructor at Harvard and taught T. S. Eliot how to box. The title references a poem by Ernest George Moll describing his time at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.