Author Bio
Harvard: mention the name and you'll hear about academic excellence and overweening arrogance, about high-minded ambition and Harvard indifference, about pathways to power and people who think that power should be theirs simply because of where they went to college, about "the fellowship of scholars and educated men and women" and "the typical Harvard snob."
And if this was a multiple choice test, I'd check all of the above, because Harvard is a place of great contradictions, which create conflict, which creates drama.
That's why I decided to write about the place.
And I went there, too. And my son goes there now.
When he applied, I gave him this bit of advice, drawn from experience: "Some guys never get over the fact that they didn't get into Harvard. And some guys never get over the fact that they did. I don't want you to be either kind."
But back when I was a senior at a Catholic high school in Boston, there was nowhere else that I wanted to go, because, quite simply, Harvard was the best you could ask for. That's what we'd heard, anyway.
I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1968. I had been assigned to Thayer Hall, a century-old dormitory in the Yard. It was my introduction to that world of history, tradition, and excellence. I stepped into my room and was greeted by? a three-foot pile of trash. Of all the rooms in all the dormitories in Harvard Yard, mine was the one that they had forgotten to clean. Or so I thought.
That evening, my freshman education in the imperfections of even such an august institution as Harvard had begun. It would culminate on an April morning when I stood on the steps of that freshman dormitory and watched phalanxes of police eject student demonstrators from University Hall. It wasn't a tranquil time to go to college, but it wasn't boring, either. And for someone who knew that he wanted to pursue the business of story telling (in my application essay, I had written that I wanted to be like David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and other Hollywood epics), there was much to be learned of human drama as I watched disputes between students and administration spiral into outright conflict.
But it wasn't all politics. Those of us who were not part of the rebellion developed a healthy cynicism about the rebels, the administration, the whole thing. Then we got on with out lives. When my son started at Harvard, I told him that after four years there, he should feel many emotions, and one of them should be exhaustion? from trying to partake of as much as he could at Harvard. The advice was drawn from experience.
I majored in English, a good major for someone with my tastes. I directed plays, including "The Taming of the Shrew." I took courses from the so-called "great men" of the faculty like John Kenneth Galbraith, and from future greats like Stephen Jay Gould. I was tear-gassed, through no fault of my own. I worked as a research assistant for visiting history professors. I got food poisoning from an infamous tray of scalloped potatoes in the freshman union. I interviewed movie stars like James Stewart when they came to the Hasty Pudding, then wrote about them in the Harvard Independent. I tutored local kids in the Harvard Upward Bound program. I worked dorm crew and cleaned hundreds of toilets, including the one in Franklin D. Roosevelt's suite. I wrote an honors thesis in English about John Ford, a movie director. And I benefited from Harvard's generous financial aid policies.
In the summers, I worked in the Boston construction industry, and I used to say that I learned more about life on a two-foot plank thirteen stories above Boston than I ever did at Harvard, but I don't think that's true. Harvard was more fun, and the place was good to me?. so good, in fact, that when I got married a year after graduation, my wife and I decided to have our reception in the courtyard of Kirkland House, the undergraduate residence where I'd lived.
Then my wife and I headed west, to follow a circuitous path that led from the film school at the University of California through the thickets of Hollywood to the land of publishing. Movie producers kept telling me that the way I wrote screenplays, I ought to be writing novels. I wasn't sure if they were encouraging me or insulting me. So I tried one. It was called Back Bay. Some people said it was not typical of the traditional first novel, a thinly veiled explorations of the author's own life. But the main character was a Harvard graduate from a background much like mine. His name was Peter Fallon.
Readers responded to the story of Peter Fallon's hunt for a lost Revere Tea Set, which takes him on a jaunt through the history of Boston. They responded so well that at the age of twenty-nine, I had my first New York Times Best Seller. It freed me from the whims of Hollywood, so that my wife and I could move back to Boston, and I've been writing ever since? seven novels now, along with one award-winning television documentary on the life of George Washington and a cult-classic horror movie that's so cheesy I took my name off it.
I've written biographical novels like Citizen Washington, historical novels about national institutions like Annapolis, but the books that my readers have responded to most enthusiastically have been Back Bay and Cape Cod, about lost historical treasures and legendary New England locations.
And ever since Back Bay was published, readers have been asking me if I would do a sequel. So, I decided it was time to bring Peter Fallon back, a little older and wiser, set him down on his old Harvard turf, which happens to be one of the most legendary locations in America, and put him on the trail of one of Harvard's oldest legends: that John Harvard's parents knew William Shakespeare, and start asking the novelists favorite question, "What if?"
What if Shakespeare gave the Harvards a gift at the baptism of John, an original manuscript of one of his plays, and more than that, a play that has been lost to us? And what if John brought it to America and bequeathed it, along with the rest of his library, to a tiny college founded by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts in 1636, the college that took his name? Then, on a bitter January night a hundred and thirty-eight years later, Harvard Hall burned to the ground, and with it went all the books in John Harvard's bequest... Or did they? Along the way, I could ask a larger question: How did a small, poor, contentious little college, planted on the banks of the Charles a hundred and forty years before the Declaration of Independence, grow into American's richest and most famous university?
Now that I've explored Harvard's past, I've given over some time to exploring a few golf course, some good fishing holes, and a few farflung places I would like to write about. I stopped exploring basketball my declining basketball skills after I broke my wrist a year and a half ago. It's an uncomfortable little fact of my career that during the writing of every book, I have broken a bone hiking, skiing, or playing at something. It's a trend I mean to stop.
After all, my wife and I used to joke that for every book, we had a kid, but we stopped that after three books. Our first has graduated from Dartmouth. The second son is now a senior at Harvard. Our daughter is in high school and hasn't decided yet if she will apply to Harvard, Dartmouth, or someplace else.
I said to my son, as he ended his third year, "Now that you're just figuring the place out, they're getting ready to throw you out." In writing this novel, I've gone back to Harvard in more ways than one to figure out an institution of enormous modern complexity built upon a foundation of ancient tradition. But more importantly, I've gone back to tell a good story.
And the story continues at Harvard. The students get smarter. The competition for admission gets stiffer. The professors earn more honors. The young alumni make their marks on American life? or tell themselves they're about to. The old alumni recall their love of the place (or their love-hate). And all alumni are begged for cash to keep the Harvard College Fund solvent, even though the endowment is so enormous that they could keep the place going for another three hundred and sixty-five years on the interest alone.
I've been often in the last few years: "Why a Harvard novel? Why should readers in Ohio or, say, ion the UCLA campus care about this place? Well... as Solzhenitsyn said when they asked him why he chose Harvard as the site of his first speech in America: "Because it's Harvard."