In Literary Game, Yale Loses

It’s that time of year again. Starbucks is overflowing with irritating holiday cheer, the first round of midterms is over, and the refrain “Why didn’t I go to Stanford?” echoes louder in my head with each degree of wind chill.

November is a grim month in Cambridge. Luckily, Harvard has developed an annual tradition to lessen my loathing for this frigid climate and the never-ending mountain of work. Yes, The Game will take place this weekend, that one instance where my classmates and I will unite to support our football team and experience what life would have been like at a real college. Countless shirts have been circulating, praising Harvard’s dominance over Yale with varying degrees of wit and logic.

In honor of tomorrow’s festivities, let’s examine the Harvard-Yale face-off in an arena that makes much more sense than football—literature.

Harvard’s unbridled superiority became immediately apparent when comparing the wikipedia pages entitled “List of Harvard People” and “List of Yale People.” The Harvard list is organized into a tidily defined table with a substantial section devoted to alumni involved in literature. The Yale page lumps writers, actors, and other artists into the catch-all category of “History, Literature, Art, and Music,” an anorexic section feebly listing the few bright bulbs that have managed to emerge from New Haven.

The Nobel Prize for literature’s international trend necessitates that neither Harvard nor Yale has had many literature Nobel laureates, but Harvard’s 1.5 still beats Yale’s singleton. Yale has 1930 prize-winner Sinclair Lewis, while Harvard alum T.S. Eliot ’09 won in 1948. Playwright Eugene O’Neill, who took the honors in 1936, attended Harvard for one year before dropping out.

Both schools fare far better in terms of Pulitzer prize-winning alumni. Two-time Pulitzer winner David McCullough was an English major at Yale. (He won for “Truman” and “John Adams,” but his earlier collection of essays, “Brave Companions,” is hands-down one of the best books to pass time riding on the T.) Yale also boasts several playwrights who’ve won Pulitzers, including Wendy Wasserstein, Thornton Wilder, and Doug Wright. Harvard winners include autobiographer Henry Adams class of 1858, novelist James R. Agee ’32, and poets ranging from Conrad P. Aiken ’12 to former U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz ’26.

Harvard’s golden age of poetry has been lauded in numerous publications, and its early years were in part defined by the presence of power roommates Thoreau and Emerson. But how have more recent alumni authors been faring? As a case study, examine the class of 2004, which produced successful alumni novelists from both schools.

In the Yale corner is Natalie Krinsky, author of “Chloe Does Yale,” which chronicles the exploits of an insecure, surprisingly unintelligent sex columnist at Yale. Reviewers lauded the book as “too meager, too infernally moronic, for a grand denunciation” (Yale Herald) and “surprisingly dull” (NY Sun). (I’ve read it; it really is quite bad.)

Harvard’s class of 2004 featured Uzodinma Iweala, whose first novel “Beasts of No Nation” was also published in 2005. The London Times called Iweala “a confident and promising new voice” and the San Francisco Chronicle lauded “Beasts” as a “stark, vivid book.” While Krinsky writes about naked parties and men who shave their pubic hair, Iweala’s novel tackles where war and cruelty intersect and the way that people can be corrupted by circumstances. Enough said.

Of course Harvard and Yale have produced comparably great novelists, the same way we have comparably lackluster football teams. But for the sake of school spirit, I can argue that John H. Updike ’54 and Norman K. Mailer ’43 are objectively better than Tom Perrotta and Tom Wolfe. And, obviously, F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn’t matter.