"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice," Elaine Showalter writes, "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune." In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of these books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening. In Faculty Towers , Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons, the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, the sleuthing Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series, or the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often controversial career. "A read as thoroughly enjoyable as the novels themselves." ― Virginia Quarterly Review "Enjoyable . . . and always stimulating." ― The Spectator "[Showalter's] survey has all the stylistic snappiness and relish for mischief that marks the funniest books she cites." ― The Independent Elaine Showalter is a teacher, author, and critic whose books include A Jury of Her Peers: American Woman Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx; A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing; The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Culture in England, 1830-1908; Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media; and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage. A past president of the Modern Language Association, she is Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University. Introduction: What I Read and What I Read For Why is the academic novel my favorite literary genre? Maybe it's just narcissistic pleasure. One theory about the rise of the novel argues that it developed because readers like to read about their own world, and indeed about themselves. And yes, I am a professor of English literature, and yes, I myself have been a character in academic fiction at least twice, once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too not easily identified in either of these guises, and I'm not about to disclose the novels here, although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune. Long before I was a professor, however, I was addicted to reading academic novels, whose popularity coincided with my own adolescence. The genre has arisen and flourished only since about 1950, when American universities were growing rapidly, first to absorb the returning veterans, and then to take in a larger and larger percentage of the baby-booming population. The nature of higher education in America and Britain had a lot to do with it, too. Most of our universities act in loco parentis for students, creating a complete society on the campus, with housing, meals, medical care and social life all provided communally and institutionally. They actively foster close personal relations between students and faculty. Moreover, the curriculum usually includes a program in creative writing; as a result, most faculties include a few professional writers, who can observe the tribal rites of their colleagues from an insider's perspective. Of course, students have long been important characters in fiction; coming-of-age narratives and Bildungsromane have been numerous from early days. To me, however, the most interesting academic novels are about the faculty, the lifers-what one critic has called Professorromane . I found these stories entertaining, inspiring, and instructive. In the 1960s, as a first-generation college graduate, I took an immigrant's passionate ethnographic interest in their details of academic manners. They filled a novice's need to fit into a culture, and I found answers, of a sort, to many of my questions and even to questions I hadn't formed. And decade by decade, as I became a professor myself and experienced the realities and diversities of colleges and universities, I measured the gap between what I lived and what I read. I