This second edition of The American College Novel cites and describes 648 novels that are set at American colleges and universities, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe (Bowdoin College, 1828) to William Hart's Never Fade Away (University of California, 2002). This revised and updated edition contains 225 new entries, most new novels published since 1981. The annotations provide information about the novels' plots, settings, and central characters, as well as brief biographies of the authors. The bibliography is divided into two sections: student-centered and staff-centered novels, both cited in chronological order by publication year. A "starter list" of 50 American college novels is included, to help the novice reader distinguish classics within the genre, as well as indexes by author, title, college and university, and academic discipline. Intended for scholars as well as the layperson, this is a useful reference work for studying the portrayal of American higher education over time in popular fiction, as well as helping a casual reader locate a pleasurable read.
More than simply a vital collection development tool, this book can help librarians help young adults grow into the kind of independent readers and thinkers who will flourish at college.
From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, the epic untold story of college—the great political and cultural fault line of American life Winner of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award | Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction | "This book is simply terrific." —Heather Cox Richardson | "Ambitious and engrossing." —New York Times Book Review | "A must-read." —Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college” crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy" of clustered, educated elites. Somewhere in the winding last half-century of the United States, the quest for a college diploma devolved from being proof of America’s commitment to learning, science, and social mobility into a kind of Hunger Games contest to the death. That quest has infuriated both the millions who got shut out and millions who got into deep debt to stay afloat. In After the Ivory Tower Falls, award-winning journalist Will Bunch embarks on a deeply reported journey to the heart of the American Dream. That journey begins in Gambier, Ohio, home to affluent, liberal Kenyon College, a tiny speck of Democratic blue amidst the vast red swath of white, post-industrial, rural midwestern America. To understand “the college question,” there is no better entry point than Gambier, where a world-class institution caters to elite students amidst a sea of economic despair. From there, Bunch traces the history of college in the U.S., from the landmark GI Bill through the culture wars of the 60’s and 70’s, which found their start on college campuses. We see how resentment of college-educated elites morphed into a rejection of knowledge itself—and how the explosion in student loan debt fueled major social movements like Occupy Wall Street. Bunch then takes a question we need to ask all over again—what, and who, is college even for?—and pushes it into the 21st century by proposing a new model that works for all Americans. The sum total is a stunning work of journalism, one that lays bare the root of our political, cultural, and economic division—and charts a path forward for America.
Literal and metaphorical excavations at Sweet Briar College reveal how African American labor enabled the transformation of Sweet Briar Plantation into a private women’s college in 1906. This volume tells the story of the invisible founders of a college founded by and for white women. Despite being built and maintained by African American families, the college did not integrate its student body for sixty years after it opened. In the process, Invisible Founders challenges our ideas of what a college “founder” is, restoring African American narratives to their deserved and central place in the story of a single institution — one that serves as a microcosm of the American South.
Excerpt from The College Novel in America: With a Preface How this book happens to appear in its present guise, under the imprint of the Southern Illinois University Press and in the Crosscurrents series, with this particular preface writer, is itself a college-novel anecdote. In 1961, when I was an official of the College English Association, the editor of that organization's journal, the cea Critic - Professor Donald Sears, now of Skidmore College - asked me to write an essay on the academic novel. The result appeared in the May issue as Campus in Wonderland, and it brought a storm of mail. Some of this was expected, since a short article couldn't possibly discuss everyone's favorite book on the subject: suggested additions arrived by every post, and some publishers even sent books which hadn't been mentioned. But a good many of the letters simply expressed happiness because someone had written on the subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
