Author Likes Old Housing System

"Somehow nothing is quite right when one suddenly spends ten million dollars," is a comment made about the Houses by a Harvard alumnus in a new novel by John P. Marquand '15, Pulitzer Prize winner and satirist of Boston's intellectual society.

"When I was at Harvard it had been the fashion to live in ugly frame houses which lined the streets off Massachusetts Avenue . . . . now that the entire academic scene had changed I did not feel at home," relates Marquand's fictional Harvard alumnus in "Wickford Point."

"In the heat of the early summer evening the new buildings along the Charles were neither familiar nor sentimental objects. I had never understood why they were jammed so closely together, or why they had so many chimneys.

Marquand received the Pulitzer Prize last year for his novel "The Late George Apley," which like his latest novel, concerns a Boston family with generations of Harvard graduates.