Word: gessen
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...Just as Gessen characterizes his novel as one about the “disappointments of young men with the world,” — first, perhaps, with Harvard, and then with what they encounter next — so too do the trials Wurtzel and the others memoirists describe extend beyond the realm of Harvard...
...Although Keith A. Gessen ’97, the author of “All The Sad Young Literary Men,” is a novelist, the sentiments he conveys through his characters are indeed tied to his own feelings about his Harvard experience. In his 2008 novel, one of the things Gessen hoped to convey in a protagonist’s flashbacks to his days at Harvard was the letdown Gessen experienced when he realized the college of his dreams was not what he had imagined...
...seemed natural to go ahead and call him Keith. And in a way, he’s the character who is least actually like me.” The roommate character is an amalgam of Gessen’s actual roommates. As for other central figures in the book, Gessen graduated two years ahead of Kristin Gore, but he insists that Lauren, the vice president’s daughter in the book, is not based on Gore, who he only knew “a tiny...
...Keith A. Gessen ’97 is one of the founding editors of the literary-political journal n+1 and author of the novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men.” In a recent interview with The Crimson, Gessen discussed Harvard, critical theory, and the role that literature has played in his life. The Harvard Crimson: I’d like to start off by thinking about the somewhat strange and unsatisfying journeys your characters take to something approaching success and self-understanding. What were your post-collegiate years like?Keith Gessen: When...
...Keith A. Gessen ’97 might have lived the vast majority of his life in America, but, as his book-flap biography points out, he was born in Russia. And though the fact of his birth does not make him a “Russian writer,” the utmost seriousness with which he approaches literature, very clearly on display in his debut novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” does establish him as a writer in the Russian model. It is not that Gessen sees no room for levity...