Yale, imagined

Novelists have often put Yale in their fiction, setting their books on campus and peopling them with Yale academics. YourYale invites you to step into five fictional domains that embrace the university as the vibrant center of scholarship and research it is known to be the world over.

“The Great Gatsby”

“[Daisy’s] husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever-played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.”

The late Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, described “The Great Gatsby” as having “only a few rivals as the great American novel of the twentieth century.”1

Published 100 years ago, the Jazz Age novel centers on self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quest to rekindle a romance with long-lost love Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, a Yale graduate whose Midwestern family wealth spans generations. Narrating the book’s events is Midwesterner Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate, World War I veteran, and Gatsby’s Long Island neighbor.

“Even after many decades,” Bloom also wrote, “the relevance of ‘The Great Gatsby’ increases, because it is the definitive romance of the American dream, a concept or vision that haunts our society.”

Yale’s Beinecke Library is home to a variety of writings, correspondence, and other ephemera from Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda — including a first-edition copy of “The Great Gatsby” that was once presented to Gertrude Stein.

“Ninth House” and “Hell Bent”

“Alex hurried across the wide, alien plane of Beinecke Plaza, boots thudding over flat squares of clean concrete. The giant cube of the rare-books collection seemed to float above its lower story. During the day its panels glowed amber, a burnished golden hive, less a library than a temple. At night it just looked like a tomb.”

Leigh Bardugo ’97 published her first two books for adult audiences — “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” in 2019 and 2023, respectively. Both are dark fantasy novels that feature Yale student Alex Stern, who can communicate with ghosts.

The author riffs on Yale’s secret societies in the best-selling “Ninth House”, where each harbors its own magic signature. “Hell Bent”, the second in what is a trilogy, features Sterling Memorial Library (SML) as the place through which Alex and others descend into hell via a portal. Drawing on her own Yale experiences to craft the plot, Bardugo weaves in real Yale buildings, streets, and campus landmarks into the story.

In a 2023 interview with the Yale Alumni Magazine, Bardugo noted that “Yale had a kind of magic, an alchemy… I was always going to use Sterling [in Hell Bent]. I wanted to create something where people could discover this place and follow the clues. A building that’s so bizarre and so effusive — the definition of extra — which is what I love about it.”

“Love Proof”

“He walked her to Hopper’s iron gate, where they stood under a streetlamp, the yellow windows of her college, and 13 billion years of starlight.”

This novel by Madeleine Henry ’14, set almost entirely on Yale’s campus, was tapped by The New York Times as ”New and Noteworthy” when it was published in 2021: “Physics and romance intersect in this novel about a brilliant young scientist who drops her studies for an all-consuming relationship, then returns to the lab to prove that love really can be forever.”

Henry, who wrote two unpublished novels during her senior year at Yale, borrows from her own time at her alma mater for the setting and the atmosphere, also exploring ideas like the balance between achievement and relationships. When asked by Yale News why she chose Yale as a setting, she said, “Yale seemed like the perfect setting for a story about permanent love because Yale is a landmark, a place that is classic and enduring. On a personal level, Yale is one of my homes. I really grew up there. I have a lot of affection for the school.”

“A Discovery of Witches”

“After earning my degree, I fought fiercely for a spot on the faculty at Yale, the only place that was more English than England.”

Deborah Harkness is a historian of science and medicine, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, has studied at Yale, and has written scholarly books about the history of alchemy and magic. Making her main character a professor at a university like Yale not only reflects Harkness’s own academic background but also allows her to explore the intersection of the world of books and the world of magic and the supernatural, which are central themes in the story.

The fictional Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale, finds a long-lost manuscript at Oxford’s Bodeleian library and discovers she is a witch. She soon enters into a forbidden romance with a vampire scientist. “A Discovery of Witches” (2011) became a New York Times best-seller and later aired as a television series. The novel is the first in what has become the “All Souls” trilogy.

“Americanah”

“After his first visit, she went back to New Haven with him. There were weeks that winter, cold and sunny weeks, when New Haven seemed lit from within, frosted snow clinging on shrubs, a festive quality to a world that seemed inhabited fully only by her and Blaine. They would walk over to the falafel place on Howe Street for hummus, and sit in a dark corner talking for hours, and finally emerge, tongues smarting with garlic.”

Acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ’08 M.A. won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her third novel “Americanah” in 2013. Main character Ifemelu attends Yale after emigrating from Nigeria, and Yale is where Ifemelu struggles for the first time with racism and falls in love with a Yale college professor named Blaine. This is one of a series of relationships for Ifemelu in a novel that traces her life in both the U.S. and Nigeria.

Yale provided Adichie with food for fiction, reflected in “Americanah.” In her 2019 Class Day speech, she remarked how good it was to be back and to be reminded of her time at Yale. “Being here at Yale afforded me many opportunities to engage in that activity so essential for a fiction writer — eavesdropping. I did it in the library, in the gym, by walking a little too close to people in the hallways. For a writer, almost nothing is out of bounds if it leads to collecting material for fiction. And Yale, with its wide range of interesting people — I mean, just look at your hats! — offered material that was absolute gold.”

¹ Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Guides for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2006)