Long ago I got very fired up about going to college at the U of C when I read a very moving novel about two Chicago students grappling with their studies and the baggage of their prior lives while falling in love. I particularly remember a climactic scene between them on the quad, which made the place seem very familiar when I actually arrived there and hoped to have scenes of that sort myself.
I suspect there are some newly admitted Chicago students out there who would like to read about their fictional counterparts before commencing their own real life adventures. Here is a short reading list:
"The Silence of History" by James T. Farrell - the novel that inspired me in 1963. The book itself was set in an even earlier period. Read it for history as well as for the affecting portrait of aspiring students of a typical UChicagoish vintage of almost any period.
"The Pursuit of Happiness" by Thomas Rogers. Another love story between UChicago students. Several scenes take place in classic campus and off-campus hangouts, but much of the story concerns a family struggle over a crazily eccentric Kenwood mansion. You will see that sort of place when you get there.
"Letting Go" by Philip Roth. This was an early novel that captures Roth's own experience as a young instructor at the University, which involved falling in love with a student (you could do that in those days) who is a classic messed-up beautiful brilliant wreck of a woman from the midwestern hinterlands - a type of woman and a tortured relationship of the sort Roth depicted over and over in his later fiction. Not quite your typical U of C student but recognizable, including the heavy aura of angst clinging to her.
I just ordered Farrell’s The Silence of History. From an Amazon review it looks like a great read. I intend to pass it along to one of my daughters. Thanks for your depth of knowledge about my favorite university.
Philip Roth’s Letting Go. Liking it so far. Enjoying his turn of phrases, ie: “receiving the balm of sympathy.” As I’ve gotten older, I started perceiving sympathy (unlike empathy) as more of a ‘weakener’–the recipient of so-called sympathy is weak and defenseless. But I guess sometimes, you just need a quick salve.
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Got distracted from other books by this shinier, newer one. I don’t think the author went to UChicago, but the protagonist is a brilliant scientist, so of course, he graduated from UChicago, lol. The story also takes place in Chicago, so for Chicagoans, they’ll recognize some of the neighborhoods and landmarks mentioned. It’s a sci-fi, metaphysical, thriller. (I like those genres, but I’ll read anything.) Really enjoying it as well.
@uocparent , a Broadway play from a few years ago, “Proof”, is actually set in Hyde Park and has lots of U of C references. It was written by a Chicago alumnus and has as its protagonists, if memory serves, a Chicago prof and his daughter, a Chicago student, who it turns out is a brilliant mathematician in denial of her own prodigiousness.
I was in “Proof”. Anthony Hopkins was really really funny off camera. Jake Gyllenhal was hot… oh those bedroom eyes! (and he was not fat back then, around the same time as Brokeback Mountain) Too bad Proof was not a box office success.
@marlowe1 I have not seen the play, but did see the movie adaptation of “Proof.” I enjoyed that movie as well. Yes, Hopkins played the brilliant mathematician who teaches at the University of Chicago.
@FStratford, wow, you were in it?? Which character did you play?
Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Ravelstein are not likely to inspire many 18-year-olds to want similar experiences, but they are full of University of Chicago color, and the latter is very much a roman a clef about the university.
On a less elevated plane: Chris Columbus’ first film, Adventures in Babysitting, has a very young, very hot Elizabeth Shue and her charges visiting a University of Chicago frat party that pretty much seems like a frat party.
I don’t know if it counts, but the first film in the Divergent series (umm . . . Divergent) was mostly located in a future Chicago that stood for hell on Earth. The bad-guy Erudite faction appropriately has its headquarters in the Mansueto Library.
We ought to give a tip of the hat to “When Harry Met Sally”, which has that opening scene between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as recent Chicago graduates who are for some reason just meeting each other on the grass smack dab in the center of the quad. In that scene they agree to share a ride to New York and immediately get in a car conveniently parked there on the turning circle, which then drives north with a beautiful tracking shot following the exit through Hull Gate (which was not at the time in question normally open). Nothing else in the film concerns UChicago, and none of the people involved (Rob Reiner, Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) appear to have any connection to the University. However, I have always thought that the wise-cracking principals might have taken some of their inspiration from the dialogues of Nichols and May, if not the actual real life relationship of that famous pair. They must surely have been big influences on Reiner and Ephron. Making the characters Chicago students could have been an homage to them. However, when the authors created the wised-up quirky characters of Ryan and Crystal and asked themselves what university such characters must have come from - well, the answer might have been obvious.
I’m seriously impressed with our number-crunching friend, @FStratford. Who would have imagined a sideline in the show-biz world! Don’t tell me you also had a part in When Harry Met Sally? Perhaps you are the Forrest Gump of movies with UChicago subject matter! (Nothing surprises me about U of C grads.)
Also, there’s Keanu Reeves playing a University of Chicago student in the 1996 movie Chain Reaction, building some sort of atom-splitting machine. Some pretty hot alums went to UChicago in the movies, lol.
Here’s another novel: Peter de Vries’ “The Blood of the Lamb”. It begins with a comical description of a Chicago Dutch immigrant family that includes a first-generation U of C student who has “lost his faith”. To an uncle who offers to pray for him, the wise-cracking kid sarcastically replies: “'Do dat,'said Louie, whose Chicago street diction was slowly being refined by the influences of the Midway.” There is some comical jousting between the Bible-quoting uncle and the Darwin-quoting student reminiscent of exchanges in the Scopes Trial. The uncle concludes that “it’s that damnable school where they teach you such things.” --That reminded a lot of us of a certain tension that once existed in poor families that sent a bright kid off to the godless University of Chicago.
