The College Novel

A comedic satire about a struggling writer/college professor and his failure to come to terms with aging. Chabon based the character on a real professor he met during his time at the University of Pittsburgh.

This deeply layered novel concerns an aged university archivist in charge of protecting T.S. Eliot's love letters to Emily Hale, and the strange parallels between the history of the letters and the relationship the archivist forms with a young woman determined to read them.

Delillo's second novel tells the story of a Cold War era college football star obsessed with nuclear war and the existential angst it causes on and off the football field.

A decidedly modern take on privileged college life and the drama therein, including a love triangle and a suicide.

A book famous for its contribution to modern feminism and its story of a 1950s housewife becoming an empowered Harvard postgraduate student.

The despairing tone of Joyce Carol Oates meets academia in a novel about college faculty members falling in and out of relationships with each other and a guest poet-in-residence.

This early novel by accomplished science fiction writer Neal Stephenson takes a few hilarious swings at the absurdities of university life and adds some sci-fi-like absurdities of its own: think giant sewer rats, self-realizing computers, and small-scale campus wars with heavy artillery.

In yet another satire about college life, Reed skewers all manner of campus political correctness in a funny fashion.

Philip Roth takes on academic life in this novel about a dean of faculty who says the wrong thing and has an affair with the wrong person, thereby opening himself to attack by enemies made over the span of his career.

The hilarious story of an English professor at a mediocre, rust belt Western Pennsylvania university reflecting on where his life has gone while dealing with angry colleagues, a kidney stone, and unwanted attention after threatening to strangle a goose.