Review Essay Campus Life Revealed: Tracking Down the Rich Resources of American Collegiate Fiction

Anyone who has ever attended a PowerPoint pre-sentation about campus finances at a Board of Trustees meeting will be tempted to conclude that university budget reports are the paramount works of fiction in higher education because they often stretch credibil-ity. This cynical yet limited impression needs to be tempered with the re-minder that, in fact, we also are heirs to a rich tradition of thoughtful, perceptive writing about higher education. John E. Kramer’s The Ameri-can College Novel (2004) itself may not be “great literature”—but it cer-tainly is a great guide to the great and not-so-great fiction about Ameri-can colleges and universities. For scholars who wish to understand the portrayal of American higher education in popular culture it is a prodi-gious, indispensable resource. This second edition, an update to his 1981 book, reviews 648 academic novels published through 2002, adding 223 novels to the 425 he annotated in the first edition. The book’s annotations are divided almost evenly by student- and staff-centered novels (319 of the former, 329 of the latter). Kramer’s purpose in com-piling this annotated collection is twofold: for those who enjoy reading college novels for pleasure and for scholars who use college novels as a tool for understanding how higher education is perceived in America