How often I’ve met people who keep it by their beds or somewhere handy, and read random pages aloud to lighten their hearts.” In a memorial essay, Jarrell’s friend Robert Lowell wrote, “ Pictures from an Institution, whatever its fictional oddities, is a unique and serious joke book.

Nominated for a National Book Award, Pictures is the American counterpart to Lucky Jim in the development of the genre. The wits are Jarrell, the narrator, and his character Gertrude Johnson (based on Mary McCarthy), who is gathering material for a scathing satirical novel about her colleagues. Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell, 1954īeneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits (publisher summary). In a 2002 retrospective on Lucky Jim, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.” Jim Dixon, lecturer in medieval history, endures penury, pretension, publish or perish, and plagiarism before escaping the academy. Kingsley Amis sends up the world of red-brick universities in this 1954 classic, his prize-winning first novel and the beginning of the modern genre of academic satire. Here is a list of some of our favorite works of academic satire, starting with the best and oldest. And because satire is nearly as strange as real life, both of us appreciate academic satires in particular. We both appreciate satire and how close to the bone it can truly cut. Together, we have 50 years of experience working in an academic setting. There is just something about institutions of higher learning where the stuff of life can often get in the way of academics and learning. In his 1889 essay “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde famously noted, 'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” Life may seem absurd - perhaps at its most so when the setting is a college or university.

Moo by jane smiley