The Groves of Academe is the title of a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (author)

Mary Therese McCarthy was an American author, critic and political activist.- Early life :Born in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and his wife, the former Therese Preston, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918...

. Considered to be one of the first academic novels

Campus novel

A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s...

, it concerns the sequence of events that take place after Henry Mulcahy, a literary instructor at the fictive Jocelyn College, learns that his teaching appointment will not be renewed. The novel is intended as a satire of academics based on the author's teaching experiences at Bard

Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

 and Sarah Lawrence

Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...

 Colleges. The book is prefaced by a quote from Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

's Epodes, Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum, which translates from the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 as "And Seek for Truth in the Garden of Academus." The book's first chapter

Chapter (books)

A chapter is one of the main divisions of a piece of writing of relative length, such as a book. Chapters can be numbered in the case of such writings as law code or they can be titled. For example, the first chapters of some well-known novels are titled:*"The Boy Who Lived" – Harry Potter...

, "An Unexpected Letter," originally appeared in the New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

.

Characters

• Henry Mulcahy is the literature instructor and Joyce
  James Joyce
  James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
  
   expert around whom the story revolves. Though portrayed at first as a sympathetic character, he is later revealed to be a highly manipulative, duplicitous, and self-serving individual.
• Maynard Hoar is the President of Jocelyn College, and the man responsible for Mulcahy's dismissal.
• Howard Furness is the chairman of Jocelyn's literature department.
• Domna Rejnev, a young woman from Russia
  Russia
  Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
  
  , is the youngest member of the literature department and the first of the faculty to hear of Mulcahy's woes.

Plot Summary by Chapter

The work is written in the third person, omniscient narrative mode and begins from Mulcahy's perspective, but later focuses on the perspectives of the other faculty members involved in the story, Domna Rejnev in particular.

Brief Excerpt

". . . they had succeeded in leading him up the garden path into one of their academic mazes, where a man could wander for eternity, meeting himself in mirrors. No, he repeated. Possibly they were all very nice, high-minded, scrupulous people with only an occupational tendency towards backbiting and a nervous habit of self-correction, always emending, penciling, erasing; but he did not care to catch the bug, which seemed to be endemic to these ivied haunts."