College and University Presidents in Fiction
This article explores the ways in which college and university presidents are depicted in American "academic novels."' There are more than four hundred of these literary epics-fictionalized accounts of life in American institutions of higher learning-and presidents appear in nearly all of them.2,3 Indeed, the very first American academic novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe [12], contained a detailed portrait of the Reverend Dr. Melmoth, president of Harley College. Harley was modeled after Bowdoin, Hawthorne's alma mater, but the character of the Reverend Melmoth was not based upon Dr. William Allen, the stern and autocratic president of Bowdoin during