Alison Lurie's 1974 campus novel,
The War Between the Tates, is a
roman a clef partly inspired by the 1969 events at Cornell, and set in "Corinth University" which seems mighty like Cornell.
I had not read this novel before, and did not know of the Cornell connection, until a reader of this blog asked if I knew of a novel depicting the 1969 events at Cornell. I asked around, found, and read
The War Between the Tates. It is not really about the '69 events, but takes place about that time, and features a women's liberation group occupation of a conservative faculty member's office. The main characters in the story are a philandering government professor (Brian Tate) and his wife (and their children, who they do not like!) so the novel is more about generational and gender conflicts, and about marriage and infidelity, than about race.
The Pulitzer Prize winning author,
Alison Lurie, was an adjunct professor in the English Department at Cornell in 1969. She later received tenure there, and is now an emerita professor.
I have heard suggestions that the character of Brian Tate was thinly based on a real Cornell professor, though Lurie herself later said that the characters in the novel were composites, based on various people she knew at three different universities.
Another character in the novel, the conservative and sexist Professor Dibble, has also been compared to Cornell's flamboyant and outspoken government professor Allan Bloom. (Bloom was, in reality, much involved in the 1969 events at Cornell. And despite his political leanings, his introductory course on political philosophy, which I took as a freshman at Cornell, was one of the things that turned me on to government and politics).
The novel is an absorbing and entertaining read. And while it won't tell you much about the realities of Cornell in the 1960s, it is fun to immerse yourself in a fictional world constructed around a place and time that you actually experienced.
