Academic Novels

The Fall 2008 semester has started, and perhaps new plots for an academic novel are beginning to percolate in the minds of the students and professors. Academic novels, or fiction set in colleges and universities, often make satire out of an eminently susceptible institution. Below are some of the best academic novels written, arranged chronologically.

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
1954
Good-humored satire of postwar British academic life

Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov
1957
Russian-born professor

The War Between the Tates
1974
Alison Lurie
Breakup of the marriage of a prim professor and his wife in the 60s

Small World
David Lodge
1984
Literary conferences

Wonder Boys: A Novel

Michael Chabon
1995
Parody of the American fame factory and a piercing portrait of a wrtier/professor

Moo: a Novel
Jane Smiley
1995
Setting is a large midwestern agricultural college, whose faculty and students are depicted with sophisticated humor

Straight Man
Richard Russo
1997
Lampoon of academia set in a dysfunctional English department

Human Stain
Philip Roth
2000
A college professor is forced to resign for alleged racism.

Joe College
Tom Perrotta
2000
Great novel about college mores in the early 80s

I am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe
2004
Chronicle of college sports, fraternities, drinking, coeds, and sex

My Latest Grievance
Elinor Lipman
2006
Radical professor parents raise their daughter in a unique and open manner

Publish and Perish
James Hynes
2006

Characters' quests for academic credibility puts him or her in peril