Literature
The narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael, thus explains his education: "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville's famous invocation may have been autobiographical, and has been co-opted by other authors to describe unorthodox places of higher learning.
- Owen Johnson's novel, Stover at Yale, follows the college career of Dink Stover (whose prep-school life at the Lawrenceville School had been chronicled in earlier novels). A counterpart to Tom Brown at Oxford, it was once a byword. F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional Amory accepted the novel as a "kind of textbook" for collegiate life.
- Frank Merriwell, the model for all later juvenile sports fiction, plays football, baseball, crew, and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs.
- In the popular Gossip Girl teenage novel series, one of the lead characters, Blair Waldorf, is waitlisted at and ultimately accepted to Yale. She attends Yale, while two friends who were also accepted opt out of attending college altogether. Near the end of the series, Blair's mother and stepfather have a baby daughter, who is named Yale.
- Diana Peterfreund's novel, Secret Society Girl, takes place in Eli University, a thinly veiled version of Yale. Additionally, the main character is initiated into the secret society Rose & Grave, an allusion to the common naming scheme for secret societies at Yale.
- Yale appears prominently in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby (as the alma mater of narrator Nick Carraway and the antagonist Tom Buchanan), and also in his short stories "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair."
- Allusions to Yale occur frequently in the writings of Tom Wolfe, who earned a Ph.D at Yale. In his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, bond trader Sherman McCoy is described as having a "Yale chin." A character in A Man in Full carries the middle name "Ahlstrom," which he was said to have been given in honor of religious historian Sidney Ahlstrom; this is an allusion to Sydney E. Ahlstrom, who was an historian of religion on the Yale faculty from 1954 to 1984.
- Stephen Carter's novel, New England White, takes place at a university in "Elm Harbor," a city which bears a striking resemblance to Yale's home of New Haven. Carter is a law professor at Yale and a building from the university is featured prominently on the book's cover.
- In Sylvia Plath's classic novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist's "hypocritical" boyfriend Buddy Willard is described as being a Yale man.
- Yale is strongly satirized in Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day. Among other elements, one of the major characters, Kit Traverse, is described as making a deal with the devil to get into Yale. Kit's Yale education was financed by arch-villain Scarsdale Vibe, after Kit's father was killed by henchmen of his.
- Tom Perrotta's 2000 novel, Joe College, is set at Yale in the 1980s.
- Dr. R. Lars Porsena in Red Orc's Rage by Philip Jose Farmer was trained in psychiatry at Yale University. He utilizes a state of the art method of group therapy which he says he developed at Yale. This character is based on real-life psychiatrist A. James Giannini who completed his residency at Yale; this is noted in the novel.
Read more about this topic: Yale In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)