Top Results for Professorial

John Williams's Stoner follows William Stoner, a Missouri farm boy who enters the University of Missouri to study agriculture and discovers a commitment to literature. He becomes an English professor, and the novel traces his academic work alongside the difficulties of his private life. Published in...

Published in 1954, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim follows Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial English university. Dixon's attempts to keep his job bring him into contact with academic pretension and awkward social obligations. His private contempt often collides with...

At the fictional Waindell College in 1950s America, Timofey Pnin teaches Russian while negotiating an academic culture in which he often appears out of place. Vladimir Nabokov's novel turns his linguistic difficulties and social misunderstandings into comedy, but his history as a Russian exile gives...

A childhood snowball accident casts a long shadow over Robertson Davies's Fifth Business. Published in 1970, the novel takes the form of a retired schoolteacher's account of his life, addressed to the headmaster of Colborne College. Dunstan Ramsay returns to his upbringing in Deptford, Ontario, wher...

The Dying Animal is a 2001 novella by Philip Roth featuring David Kepesh, the literature professor who also appears in The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Kepesh recounts his affair with Consuela Castillo, a much younger Cuban American former student, and the jealousy and possessiveness that und...

The Groves of Academe is a 1952 novel by Mary McCarthy set at Jocelyn College, a fictional progressive institution in the United States. After learning that his appointment will not be renewed, literature instructor Henry Mulcahy manipulates colleagues by suggesting that he is being dismissed becaus...

The Professor of Desire is a 1977 novel by Philip Roth featuring David Kepesh, a character who also appears in Roth's earlier novella The Breast (1972) and later in The Dying Animal (2001). The novel traces Kepesh's intellectual and emotional development from his college years through his career as...

A Doubter's Almanac is a 2016 novel by American writer Ethan Canin about mathematical achievement, obsession, and inherited family damage. Its central figure, Milo Andret, rises from an isolated childhood to become a celebrated mathematician, but his competitiveness, alcoholism, and destructive beha...

Blue Angel is a 2000 novel by Francine Prose about Ted Swenson, a creative-writing professor at a small college in Vermont. Dissatisfied with his career and family life, Swenson becomes professionally and sexually entangled with an ambitious student, producing consequences that threaten his marriage...

Published in 1983, "The Anatomy Lesson" is a novel by Philip Roth and the third book in his Zuckerman Bound series. The narrative follows the author's recurring protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, as he experiences a debilitating bout of unexplained physical pain that severely limits his ability to write...

The Sandcastle is a 1957 novel by Iris Murdoch set largely in and around an English boys' school. Its plot follows a married schoolmaster whose settled professional and domestic life is unsettled by an infatuation with a young woman who has come to paint a portrait. The novel uses the school setting...