Princeton has produced and inspired a long line of American novelists — F. Scott Fitzgerald, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Eugenides — and the campus and town have shown up under thin disguise in dozens of novels. The picks below are the ones a visitor will find most rewarding: each one re-shapes how the place reads when you walk through it.
The Human Stain — The third novel in Roth's American Trilogy is set in fictional Athena College, a thinly-veiled version of a New England liberal arts campus rather than Princeton — but the novel's central conceit (a classics professor destroyed in a single word's worth of academic outrage) and its rendering of late-twentieth-century campus politics will be deeply familiar to anyone walking around a place like Princeton.
The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is a stand-in for Roth himself, and the larger themes — racial identity, the speech codes of the late nineties, the way intellectuals destroy each other — are unmistakably Princeton-flavoured. Roth spent his final years a short drive away in Connecticut and was a regular visitor to the area.
The Marriage Plot — Eugenides spent two decades teaching at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts, and The Marriage Plot — his 2011 campus novel — is steeped in the look and feel of an east-coast Ivy League education in the early 1980s. The novel follows three Brown University seniors through their last weeks of college and the year after, but the cadences are unmistakably the cadences of Princeton's eating clubs, semiotics seminars, and graduate-student gossip.
A useful book for anyone trying to understand why so much of the American novel is set on small college campuses: the action is small, the stakes are smaller, and what Eugenides catches better than almost anyone is how a few inches of academic infatuation can derail the rest of a life.
This Side of Paradise — Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel — written in two months at the age of twenty-three — is set largely at Princeton, where he had been a famously distracted undergraduate from 1913 until he dropped out to join the army. The book is autobiographical to the point of indiscretion: the Cottage Club, the dorm rooms in Holder Court, the long talks in the gardens of the Graduate College all appear barely-disguised on the page.
Read in Princeton today the book is half nostalgia, half period piece — but Fitzgerald's instinct for the rhythms of campus life, the small social cruelties of the eating-club system, and the slow drift of a privileged young man toward something less certain all remain disturbingly recognisable.