Clark’s page-turners—filled with relatable, often female protagonists—sold more than 100 million copies in the U.S. alone. Her first successful novel, Where Are the Children? (Simon & Schuster, 1975), told the tale of a young mother who changes her identity after she’s accused of killing her son and daughter, only to have her second set of children disappear after she finds a new husband and builds another family. It was the first in a lifelong stream of best sellers—56 in total.

Clark’s own life was itself novel-worthy. The sudden death of her father at age 11 plunged her once-comfortable Bronx family into a precarious financial situation; they lost their house for lack of a few hundred dollars. Then tragedy struck again when her husband suffered a fatal heart attack in 1964, leaving her widowed, at age 37, with five young children. But she continued to try her hand at the suspense stories she’d started writing as a young woman.

Shortly after publishing Where Are the Children?, Clark earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Fordham College at Lincoln Center after five years of night classes. The degree gave her a certain confidence that she had lacked.

“I had always missed the fact that I hadn’t matriculated,” she told FORDHAM magazine in 1989.

“I was hanging up the kids’ diplomas, and kept thinking that it wasn’t the same as having my own diploma in hand. I thought of Fordham. My husband had gone there, and I used to go to tea dances at Rose Hill.”

Overnight Success While at Lincoln Center

She attended Fordham College at Lincoln Center because of its proximity to her daytime job at a radio station. In 1978, while a student, she received a million-dollar-plus advance for the hardcover and paperback versions of her new suspense novel A Stranger is Watching (Simon & Schuster, 1977). She immediately replaced her old jalopy with a Cadillac—and she finished her degree.

A spring 1978 FORDHAM magazine piece featured Clark and her newfound success: “These days find her literally winging into her classes at Lincoln Center from all points of the U.S., where she is moving in and out of editorial rooms and television studios on interview and talk show tours to promote her latest piece of fiction. She has also moved in with the Beautiful People. Last week People Weekly chronicled her rise to literary fame and fortune in a two-page spread, and also quoted her ecstatic comment about her new apartment facing Central Park. (‘Every Irish-Catholic girl from the Bronx wants to have an apartment on Central Park South.’)”

Fordham Honors

Clark stayed close to her alma mater throughout her life. From 1990 to 1996, she served as a member of Fordham’s Board of Trustees. As a generous donor, she also became a member of the University’s Archbishop Hughes Society. She was presented with an honorary degree and served as Fordham’s commencement speaker in 1997. (“The plot is what you will do for the rest of your life, and you are the protagonist,’” she said.) She was feted with a Fordham Founder’s Award in 2004, was inducted into the University’s Hall of Honor in 2009, and was honored again in 2018 as a pioneering woman in philanthropy.

“It is very hard to say goodbye to Mary,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“Though she lived a long and rich life, she left us too soon. To speak of Mary is to speak in superlatives: She was, of course, terrifically gifted and hardworking. She was funny, and kind, and generous with her time and talents. Her work touched the lives of millions, and in person she was a force of nature. There will never be another like her. I know the Fordham community joins me in sending her family and loved ones our deepest condolences.”

A Commitment to the Next Generation

Clark’s drive to tell stories was legendary; in her obituary in The New York Times, her daughter and sometimes writing partner Carol Higgins Clark confirmed that Clark was still writing up until very recently.

Her devotion to Fordham was just as strong. In 2013, she pledged $2 million to create the Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing. At the time, she said she was adamant that it not be a “literary chair.”

“Frankly, I thought there would be scorn about that because a lot of people would say, ‘She’s just a popular writer,’” she said.

“But I thought, ‘A chair in creative writing?’ Yes, damn it! I’m a good storyteller.”

Mary Bly, Ph.D., a professor and chair of Fordham’s English Department, hosted Clark in her classes over the years. In a 2012 FORDHAM magazine article, Bly, who publishes under the pen name Eloisa James, wrote that like her, Clark possessed a split personality. How else could one explain how, as a young widow with five small children, Clark could transform feelings of love and protection into best-selling suspense?

Bly wrote that it was no surprise that Clark majored in philosophy at Fordham.

“Clark’s novels do not engage her readers merely as a matter of titillation and fear; hers are studies with high moral purpose, reflective of the importance of her Catholic faith.”

In an email just after Clark’s death, Bly said Clark would likely humbly reject the idea of having been a mentor to her, as they met at most once or twice a year.

“But every single time, she would listen with great interest to what was going on in my publishing life as Eloisa James, and invariably make a suggestion or comment that I would think of again and again. She probably played this role for many, many authors. She didn’t realize how kind she was, how giving, and how unusual,” she said.

“Her financial gift to Fordham when she established the Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing, as well as a scholarship for young writers with financial need, will allow her legacy of generosity toward fellow writers to continue. We will deeply miss her.”

In addition to receiving awards, Clark also bestowed one particularly special one at Fordham, when her grandson Justin Louis Clark graduated from the Gabelli School of Business in 2014.

“My grandmother loved Fordham. I am proud to have worn the maroon and white alongside the person who inspired me to pursue my dream as she did hers. Receiving my diploma from her on Coffey Field is a memory I will cherish forever,” Justin said by email.

“She left Fordham a better school, the world a better place, and me a better person.”

Clark was generous with her time with fellow alumni as well. Lynn Neary, TMC ’71, who recently retired from National Public Radio, covered Clark’s 90th birthday celebration in 2017 and Veronica Dagher, GABELLI ’00, ’05, host of the Wall Street Journal podcast Secrets of Wealthy Women, interviewed her in 2018.

In her story, Neary quoted Clark on readers’ reactions to her stories: “That is the greatest compliment I can get,” Clark said, “when someone will say to me, ‘I read your darn book till 4 in the morning.’ I say, ‘Then you got your money’s worth.’”

For Susan Wabuda, Ph.D., a professor of history, Clark’s passing brought back memories of meeting her and Clark’s late husband John J. Conheeney, to whom she was married from 1996 to 2018, at a luncheon co-sponsored by Fordham’s Campion Institute.

“It was such an honor to meet Mary Higgins Clark at Fordham events. She was generous, enthusiastic, and an absolute delight. In addition to her suspense stories, her autobiography is riveting. She was a great lady, and the model of a successful writer,” she said.

“She and John enjoyed life, and they thought the world of Fordham.”

John Ryle Kezel, Ph.D., director of the Campion Institute, said Clark had a wonderful sense of humor. He recalled how she once arrived at a banquet for the Flax Trust, which promotes peace between Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics, sporting a cane that appeared to be made of swirled glass.

“When I commented on its uniqueness, Mary said with a glint in her eye that it had been a gift from the late Fred Astaire,” he said.

“As I admired it, Mary began to chuckle, and said ‘Oh John, it’s only plastic and I got it on the internet!’”

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English and American Studies, recalled a quote by another famous author that reminded him of Clark.

“E.B. White famously wrote that it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer,” he said.

“Mary Higgins Clark was both, and her friendship to Fordham is something we’ll always be grateful for.”

Higgins Clark is survived by her children Marilyn Clark, Warren Clark, PAR ’14, and his wife Sharon Clark, PAR ’14, David Clark, Carol Higgins Clark, Patricia Clark, and her grandchildren Elizabeth Higgins Clark, Andrew Clark, a student at the Gabelli School of Business’ graduate division, David Clark, Courtney Clark, Justin Clark, GABELLI ’14, and Jerry Derenzo.

The evening, titled “The Social Value of Crime Fiction,” celebrated the impressive work of both best selling mystery author Higgins Clark, FCLC ’79, and crime fiction legend Lee Child.

Child is the author of the famous Jack Reacher novel series. His bibliography includes over 20 novels, all centered on Reacher, a character who is a drifter and assassin with a strong moral code. Child has also published more than a dozen short stories and has worked on movie adaptations of his books. His 21st Reacher novel, Night School, will be released in November.

Child said that when he began writing, he moved from the United Kingdom to New York and was astounded by the support he received from Higgins Clark, already a famous name in the genre. Her support of the crime writing community, said Child, changes authors for the better.

“Mary will let you know she is on your side,” he said. “Through her friendship, you learn how to become a better writer and feel you are associated with a legend.”

Child lectured on the instinctual power of storytelling and why stories—in particular crime fiction—mirror the human condition and give readers confidence. Crime fiction allows the audience to release frustrations and confront unfairness that they would otherwise not be allowed to in a civilized society.

Watching normal people surviving danger and peril also gives others courage, said Child. Through fiction, the audience is empowered to survive life’s challenges.

“There is a reason stories are older than art and music,” said Child, noting that language has been around the longest. “It’s because they are necessary for our survival.”

In his introduction of Child, Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English and American Studies, said that Child’s service is what sets him apart from fellow writers.

“He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writer Associations—service that he didn’t have to do,” said Cassuto. “He is a committed member of his community . . . one of the good guys.”

Higgins Clark, who turns 89 in December, was also in attendance. Since her graduation in 1979, she has become one of the University’s most noted alumni, acting as a member of the Board of Trustees, endowing scholarships, and challenging students with her insight and experience.

“Signing up for my first class was one of the happiest days of my life,” said Higgins Clark. “Graduating at 50 years old was also a happy day. It is a continuing joy that I am able to still be a part of this wonderful University.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University, likewise admitted to being star-struck by the talent in the room.

“I have to admit, I came here to see Lee as a fan,” said Father McShane, who confessed to taking the Reacher series on his flights to fundraising trips. “But I leave a student. I thank both of you for showing us the art, the magic, and the holy involved in storytelling.”

–Mary Awad

Fordham is one of 28 colleges and universities to win a Next Generation PhD matching grant, which aims to overhaul doctoral programs in the humanities to better prepare students for 21st-century job prospects within and outside of academia.

“The future of doctoral training in the humanities depends on innovative models that will deliver the competencies and skills that doctorate holders need to succeed in a variety of career pathways, in addition to traditional faculty lines,” said Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of GSAS and grant director, alongside co-director, Matthew McGowan, PhD, associate professor of classics.

“As a graduate school within a Jesuit university recognized for its strengths in the humanities, GSAS is uniquely situated to ask what it means truly to prepare our doctoral candidates for the fast-changing world of higher education and for the new knowledge economy,” Badowska said.

Historically, doctoral programs have prepared graduates solely for work in academia. However, with a 30 percent decline in academic job postings in the humanities since 2008, this singular focus is no longer realistic for students graduating from these programs.

“Thousands of professors are currently in the business of preparing thousands of graduate students for jobs that don’t exist,” Leonard Cassuto, PhD, professor of English and a collaborator on the project, said in his recent book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2013).

The $25,000 planning grant, to be matched by an additional $25,000 from GSAS, will not only propose rethinking Fordham’s five doctoral programs in the humanities (classics, English, history, philosophy, and theology), but will also examine what a 21st-century PhD program at any institution should encompass. For instance, what advanced transferrable skills should be taught at the doctoral level? Should skills such as collaborative teamwork and advanced digital proficiency be treated on a par with traditional emphases, such as mastery of field-specific knowledge and independent research skills?

In addition to Badowska and McGowan, the project includes a Core Planning Group and Constituent Advisory Group comprising GSAS faculty, current doctoral candidates, alumni, and community leaders who would benefit from hiring graduates with doctoral-level expertise.

At the end of the academic year, the group will produce a white paper detailing the proposed model.

“We want to rethink how we deliver the PhD at our University, but also make it scalable to other institutions and humanities programs,” said Melissa Labonte, PhD, associate dean of GSAS and associate professor of political science. “To do right by the students in these programs, we need to rethink the entire model. This planning grant will allow us to begin this process.”

A key part of the grant will address making doctoral programs in the humanities more inclusive of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized communities, Labonte said. Within these groups, the percentage of students who enroll in a doctoral-level program has dropped precipitously in recent decades.

“We’re trying to find ways to counter this trend,” Labonte said. “This part of the grant falls very much in line with Fordham’s mission. If we’re going to embrace progressivism and social justice models, then we have to think about how PhD programs in the humanities will address the needs of people from underserved communities.”

The NEH announced the Next Generation PhD grants winners on Aug. 9 as part of $79 million in grants for 290 humanities projects and programs across the country, an initiative the group undertook to mark its 50th anniversary year.

The Graduate School Mess: What

The numbers tell us that graduate school is in trouble. Too many students take longer to earn PhDs than they should, and when they finally do, the job market is not what they expect it to be. In The Graduate School Mess, Leonard Cassuto makes a case for revamping curricula to emphasize “higher education as a collective social good.” And he beseeches his fellow professors to prepare students not strictly for academic careers, which are rare, but for a broad range of employment opportunities. “When we teach Ph.D.s to be satisfied only with professors’ jobs, we are, quite simply, teaching them to be unhappy. That’s more than just an ethical failure,” he writes. “It’s a moral one.”

Leonard Cassuto, professor of English, is determined to change it.

In his new book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused it and How We can Fix it (Harvard University Press, 2015), Cassuto beseeches his fellow faculty to (perhaps paradoxically) present their students with viable role models in the workplace other than themselves.

This is because graduate advisers typically work at research universities, and the number of tenure-track faculty positions at research universities is small. Leading students to expect jobs just like the ones that their advisers have, Cassuto said, sets most of them up for disappointment.

Cassuto presents some alarming statistics. In a hypothetical group of 10 students entering a doctoral program in the arts and sciences today, 5 will drop out, an attrition rate of 50%. Half of those non-completers—25% of the whole—will leave soon after entering, which is, said Cassuto, a reasonable outcome: “doctoral study isn’t for everyone. Some people try it and decide to take the master’s degree and do something else.” But another 25% of that original cohort will drop out only after they’ve spent many years in the program—and that number, says Cassuto, needs to be lowered.

Of the five who do finish, Cassuto noted that, first of all, their average time to degree will range from seven years (in the sciences) to nine (in the humanities). Then, after all those years, only about half of them will get jobs as a college professors, and most at colleges and universities that place a higher premium on teaching than on research.

“If I described to you a workplace that people have to train for nine years to get into, where at the end of all that time, half of them will be gone, half of those who remain won’t get a job in that workplace at all, and the remaining quarter are going to find themselves facing a range of possible jobs that doesn’t reflect a reality that they’ve been taught to expect, what would you say about a workplace like that? You might call it laughable and ridiculous, and yet this is the workplace we run,” he said.

Siren Song of Research

Cassuto, who writes a column called “The Graduate Adviser” for the Chronicle of Higher Education, blames “research chauvinism,” in which professors tend to place a higher premium on their own positions at research universities while giving short shrift to other career possibilities.

“If a graduate student hits the market with the expectation that he or she will only be truly fulfilled by a research-centered job and then confronts a market where—even if you succeed in getting a tenure-track job—it’s not likely to meet that expectation, that student will not be happy,” he said. “Teaching students to think that way is not just unethical. It’s immoral.”

In fact, he said that preliminary research indicates that students who earn PhDs in the humanities often have successful and satisfying careers in an array of other fields. They just have to get past the initial feeling of failure, because they never grabbed the “brass ring” of a professor job.

“One businessman I talked to for my book who likes to hire PhDs said they’ve got a great skill set that someone else paid for, Cassuto said. “He’s happy to hire them; they move up very fast and do very well.”

Aside from the moral imperative of helping students fulfill the potential of their degrees, Cassuto said professors should broaden their horizons as a matter of survival. Like it or not, the American public is skeptical of how much “use value” lies in a graduate degree today.

“If we want our enterprise to survive and thrive in the decades to come, we’d better broaden our hearts and minds and teach our students to broaden theirs. Otherwise, we’re going to be fighting off discontented graduates and a discontented public, and who wants that?”

To illustrate the nature of disgust, Dean McKay holds up an untarnished blue pen and poses a hypothetical: He found it buried in something foul and smelly (we’ll spare you), but he’s completely cleaned it.

“So I assure you it’s fine. Would you like to use it?” he asks, rhetorically. “You’d probably have great hesitancy.”

Such is the potency of disgust, says McKay, Ph.D., a Fordham psychology professor who studies its role in behavioral disorders. His work is part of a trend: After years of avoiding it—perhaps understandably—in their research, scholars are giving new attention to this often-irrational emotion that holds such powerful sway.

“There’s an increased recognition that disgust has been underappreciated in the value it has for understanding human behavior, and then also warrants further examination in the role it has in psychopathology,” McKay said.

His own work centers on disgust in conditions like childhood anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder. He’s in the early stages of devising therapies that target disgust, which is so well-hidden that usually people don’t even mention it when seeking help.

“We tend to not be terribly aware of the things that disgust us, except the most brutally obvious things,” he said.

That’s why disgust is understudied, he said. “In a lot of ways, clinicians have been guided first and foremost by what their clients report, or by what others around them report. It was difficult to see its relevance, and there wasn’t really a good theory that said, ‘Here’s why we might expect disgust to play a role in psychopathology.’”

McKay discovered that role while helping one of his patients deal with her contamination fears. Using a common approach, he asked her to touch various intimidating things—like a fresh, clean trash bag in a wastebasket—and rate her anxiety.

“She said to me, ‘I’m not anxious at all. I find it yucky,’” even though she had expected to be afraid, he said. Other objects brought the same reaction. Over and over, “she used the language of disgust to describe her experience and not fear,” McKay said.

After a survey of his other patients found that disgust at least played a part in their disorders, he delved further into the topic. Last year, in a study of children grappling with anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder, he found that disgust was somewhat mitigated by traditional therapies that help patients confront the things they fear.

But greater progress calls for new therapies tailored to disgust. McKay noted that fear and disgust involve entirely different bodily systems: Fear is governed by the amygdala—considered the “seat of fear”—and the sympathetic nervous system, which rev the body up into fight-or-flight mode. But disgust comes from the parasympathetic nervous system, which in this case relaxes the body to slow the absorption of any germs picked up from something yucky.

Disgust also involves the insula, a brain region associated with taste and gustatory responses (hence the “gust” in “disgust”). One possible therapy would help people acclimate themselves to the symptoms of disgust, like nausea, but much more research is needed, McKay said.

Disgust comes in different varieties, McKay said. Contamination fear, “the quintessential disgust problem,” can repel people from objects that are obviously clean, like an unused garbage bag or that blue pen he held up. Another variety of disgust, the law of similarity, spooks people when something looks too much like a disgusting object, as in the movie Caddyshack, in which a floating candy bar sends swimmers fleeing from a pool, he said.

Other disgust triggers are culturally specific—like, say, ice cream on steak, or sex acts considered abusive—or related to death or injury.

Then there’s the “stink of moral decay,” which prompts disgust because of the possible stigma it carries, McKay said. In one classic study, people refused to put on a sweater that, they were told, had once been worn by Adolf Hitler. (Even if it had been washed. And worn by Mother Teresa after that.)

This moral disgust was one aspect of a course he has recently co-taught with English professor Leonard Cassuto. The course, Literature and Psychology of Disgust, covered the influence of disgust in aesthetics, social stigma, prejudice, and racism, as shown in literature. “There’s a litany of books that deal with this,” McKay said.

In other research, he’s working on a project with another scientist who has found that disgust may play a role in some forms of posttraumatic stress, like the kind that follows sexual abuse. McKay also won a grant to study the role of disgust in misophonia, a disorder in which particular sounds cause intense emotional reactions.

He hopes to do more work on trauma and disgust now that disgust is reasonably well established as a research topic.

“I think it’s changing a little bit and gaining a little bit more acceptability,” McKay said. “We’re now at a point where some of those basic questions have really been satisfactorily answered and so now it’s moving to a different realm.”

Scholars have linked this anti-intellectual bent to a variety of influences—for instance, the growing insularity of the Evangelical community, or the sway of charismatic church and political leaders. However, James Van Wyck, an English doctoral student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, believes that it in fact stems from something seemingly innocuous: the last century-and-a-half of fictions that Evangelicals have been reading and writing.

To prove his point, Van Wyck has taken a daunting plunge into the archives to chronicle Evangelical literary trends and how these have influenced contemporary Evangelical thought. He argues in his doctoral dissertation that 19th-century Evangelical texts relied heavily on an appeal to readers’ emotions, a technique born from a sentimentalist ethos that continues to inform Evangelical reading habits today.

Emotional value

According to Van Wyck, 19th century religious fiction was used to evangelize to “unsaved” readers and push a particular Christian social and moral agenda. To do so, Evangelical writers tended to emphasize “emotional utility over intellectual stimulation,” Van Wyck said. Books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin were written to make people “feel right,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe herself put it.

“Evangelicals retain an old, mid-19th-century understanding of fiction as a utilitarian instrument,” said Van Wyck. “A work of fiction does something to you. They want fiction to make you think right, feel right, and act right—to guide you on your pilgrimage to heaven.”

Contemporary Evangelical authors such as Janette Oak, Beverly Lewis, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—co-authors of the popular end-of-times book and movie series, Left Behind—carry on this sentimentalist tradition. What separates them from their predecessors, though, is that contemporary Evangelical fiction is produced and consumed by an insular audience. Consequently, these authors aim to provide an emotionally gratifying experience for Evangelical readers, rather than to explicitly convert non-Evangelicals.

Topping the bestsellers lists

However, there is more to this story than simply illuminating the sentimentalist roots of Evangelical anti-intellectualism, Van Wyck said. Novels written by Evangelicals dominated the literary marketplace in the mid-19th century. The sheer numbers warrant a closer look, as Evangelical fictions have distinguished themselves as some of the most strikingly popular works in the American literary canon. In 19th-century terms, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was as popular as Harry Potter. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World was acclaimed by author Henry James and artist Vincent van Gogh.

And today, though they tend to no longer attract non-Evangelical readers, these fictions boast sales in the hundreds of millions of copies and consistently top the bestsellers lists—seven of the Left Behind series reached #1 on New York Times bestsellers lists.

“Most of us in the literary criticism business got into it by reading the classics, which don’t generally encompass these religious bestsellers,” said Van Wyck’s dissertation adviser, English Professor Leonard Cassuto. “But there was a moment when I realized that the American literary tradition as it was presented to me is bigger than I thought it was.

“For me, and other critics too, there is an evolving realization that we can’t understand the book markets of the 19th century unless we also widen our view to encompass the role of religious fiction,” Cassuto said. “James Van Wyck has taken a remarkable route into the archives to do this.  Nobody has ever looked so closely at how Evangelicals actually read, and at what they were taking into account when they did so.”

But do they have an impact on anyone outside of religious circles? Van Wyck thinks so.

“Ronald Reagan, who charted much of the course of international and American identity in the 20th century, ascribed his conversion to Christianity to the book That Printer of Udell’s, which he read as a young boy,” Van Wyck said. “His whole worldview was essentially informed by a book that is all about the individual’s relationship to God and how that changes after a conversion experience.

“[To that end, one could say] Evangelical fiction has altered the course of history.”

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Leonard Cassuto delivers the English Dept.’s Sixth Inaugural Lecture Photo by Tom Stoelker

In a lecture steeped in historical research, Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English, dove into the current debate on American higher education on Sept. 18, describing “a battle for control of the idea of the university.”

Cassuto, who writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, delivered the Department of English’s Sixth Inaugural Lecture. He is at work on a book called The Graduate School Mess, to be published by Harvard University Press.

His talk called on members of the academy to “own your academic responsibility” and to rally behind a singular sense of purpose—lest the debate be defined for them by policymakers who are veering toward a business and corporate model.

“We can’t be at war with society; society feeds us. Moreover, we’re part of this society,” said Cassuto. “The general public is angry at us right now.  They also don’t understand us very well.”

As tuition costs rise, the American middle class is understandably stressed, he said. At the same time, policymakers are introducing business metrics and metaphors, such as “return on investment,” into education, reflecting a shift from what was once viewed as a collective investment in society as a whole (the idea that an educated population is good for everyone) to a view of higher education as a purely individual financial decision.

As government pulls back from funding higher education, individuals have to pay for it—and they have come to view college education as a consumer good. Higher education may not produce products that are easily identified and valued, Cassuto said, but it still remains difficult to argue against the view of education being a product.

“In Europe (where education is paid for by tax dollars) the transaction is indirect.  People pay their taxes, and the taxes pay for higher education,” said Cassuto, “but given the setup in the United States, consumers expect something for their investment,” he said. “Students and their families are in a financial collaboration with the university, and they need to feel collaborated with, and not just as customers.”

Cassuto described a historical education system that was literally and figuratively rooted in faith. For example, Princeton’s founders initially set out to train clergy and then extended the scope beyond the church, establishing a system of mutual caretaking: Society takes care of the university, the university educates “society’s children,” and the children give knowledge back to society. He noted that the tradition of taking care of society’s children has been distorted—with competition among institutions for students even spawning dormitories that resemble spas.

Cassuto outlined how, historically, perceptions of certain political movements can be shaped by language and rhetoric.  Environmentalism, for example,  involves the imposition of a modern caretaking metaphor over a business metaphor.

“[This] is exactly what academia needs to do,” Said Cassuto.   “Higher education needs to define its relation between the university and the community,” he said.  ”And there is no consensus on what that is right now.”

“We academics, administrators, and, yes, graduate students too, need to articulate it or it will be articulated for us.”

“It’s hard enough to sum up hard-boiled literature in ten books without having to rank them,” says Cassuto, “So I present the following in alphabetical order.”

Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986):The best entry in Block’s best series, starring the alcoholic, moralist, vigilante, and oh yes, detective Matthew Scudder. Block is a fabulist at heart, and in Ginmill he spins a terrific, mordant fable.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934):Briefly banned in Boston, this short novel is worth reading for the sheer propulsive energy of Cain’s prose alone, which conveys the sexual urgency that drives the plot. Postman is the first of a handful of great books that Cain wrote; other standouts include Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953): Most of Chandler’s novels are genre classics, but Goodbye is his most ambitious. It’s a character-driven story of friendship and betrayal, with Philip Marlowe, perhaps the most memorable character in American crime writing, at its emotional center.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930): The best book by the most influential crime writer of the 20th century, the man who brought popularity and critical acclaim to the new hard-boiled style in the late 1920s. You saw the movie. Now read the book.

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (1981): Harris may be the second most influential twentieth-century crime writer, for it was he who refined the formula for the serial killer story as police procedural. (Though Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin could easily have set those wheels in motion.) Red Dragon, the best of Harris’s slender output, introduces the character of Hannibal Lecter, the most memorable villain in the entire crime canon.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mister Ripley (1955): Years after her death, Highsmith is finally receiving her due as one of the most imaginative crime writers around. Her bleak vision received its quintessential expression in the character of Thomas Ripley, a wonderfully compelling antihero. Highsmith subsequently wrote four more novels about Ripley, but the first one is the best.

Chester Himes, The Heat’s On (1966): Chester Himes’s career turned on irony: frustrated by the commercial failure of his literary fiction, he turned to crime novels to make money—and his crime novels brought the acclaim he had been seeking. Himes’s crime stories are set in a Harlem that brims with con men seeking targets. Good and bad guys alike engage in a carnival of violent and grotesquely funny schemes: this is satire with dark and angry purpose, written with a light touch.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005; English translation 2008): Larsson’s Millennium trilogy begins with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a departure from the Swedish title, which translates, roughly, as “Men Who Hate Women.” The English title is an improvement because it points to what makes the series special: the character of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most interesting superheroes of this or any other time.

John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper (1979): MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, which ran from the mid-sixties through the mid-eighties, is one of the enduring monuments of postwar crime fiction. Beach bum McGee acts as a “salvage consultant,” recovering things that people have lost in exchange for a percentage of their value. In The Green Ripper, the best of the later installments in the McGee saga, the person who has lost something is McGee himself.

Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake), The Hunter (1962): The first in a remarkable series of novels that break all of the storymaking rules, The Hunter introduces Parker, a main character with no interior life, and no goals other than his work as a robber. Yet the Parker novels, written in a style so plain that “bleak” might be a better word for it, are utterly hypnotizing.

Charles Willeford, Miami Blues (1984): You never know exactly when Charles Willeford is kidding around. Miami Blues is one of his last novels, and the crime in it is incidental to the domestic problems of the detective and the criminal. Willeford’s settings ranged from art galleries to cockfighting, and his characters could be delightfully strange. Miami Blues was made into a pretty good movie, but the book captures Willeford’s eccentricities.

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Cassuto is the author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories(2009), which was shortlisted for the Edgar and Macavity awards and also made a Ten Best list of its own, named one of the Ten Best crime and mystery books of the year by the Los Angeles Times.
www.lcassuto.com

January marks the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, but it is also the month that annual Edgar® Award nominations are made for the best in crime writing. Fordham Professor of English Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., himself an Edgar® nominee, shares his personal ten best hard-boiled crime novels.

“It’s hard enough to sum up hard-boiled literature in ten books without having to rank them,” says Cassuto, “So I present the following in alphabetical order.”

Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986):The best entry in Block’s best series, starring the alcoholic, moralist, vigilante, and oh yes, detective Matthew Scudder. Block is a fabulist at heart, and in Ginmill he spins a terrific, mordant fable.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934):Briefly banned in Boston, this short novel is worth reading for the sheer propulsive energy of Cain’s prose alone, which conveys the sexual urgency that drives the plot. Postman is the first of a handful of great books that Cain wrote; other standouts include Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953): Most of Chandler’s novels are genre classics, but Goodbye is his most ambitious. It’s a character-driven story of friendship and betrayal, with Philip Marlowe, perhaps the most memorable character in American crime writing, at its emotional center.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930): The best book by the most influential crime writer of the 20th century, the man who brought popularity and critical acclaim to the new hard-boiled style in the late 1920s. You saw the movie. Now read the book.

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (1981): Harris may be the second most influential twentieth-century crime writer, for it was he who refined the formula for the serial killer story as police procedural. (Though Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin could easily have set those wheels in motion.) Red Dragon, the best of Harris’s slender output, introduces the character of Hannibal Lecter, the most memorable villain in the entire crime canon.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mister Ripley (1955): Years after her death, Highsmith is finally receiving her due as one of the most imaginative crime writers around. Her bleak vision received its quintessential expression in the character of Thomas Ripley, a wonderfully compelling antihero. Highsmith subsequently wrote four more novels about Ripley, but the first one is the best.

Chester Himes, The Heat’s On (1966): Chester Himes’s career turned on irony: frustrated by the commercial failure of his literary fiction, he turned to crime novels to make money—and his crime novels brought the acclaim he had been seeking. Himes’s crime stories are set in a Harlem that brims with con men seeking targets. Good and bad guys alike engage in a carnival of violent and grotesquely funny schemes: this is satire with dark and angry purpose, written with a light touch.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005; English translation 2008): Larsson’s Millennium trilogy begins with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a departure from the Swedish title, which translates, roughly, as “Men Who Hate Women.” The English title is an improvement because it points to what makes the series special: the character of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most interesting superheroes of this or any other time.

John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper (1979): MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, which ran from the mid-sixties through the mid-eighties, is one of the enduring monuments of postwar crime fiction. Beach bum McGee acts as a “salvage consultant,” recovering things that people have lost in exchange for a percentage of their value. In The Green Ripper, the best of the later installments in the McGee saga, the person who has lost something is McGee himself.

Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake), The Hunter (1962): The first in a remarkable series of novels that break all of the storymaking rules, The Hunter introduces Parker, a main character with no interior life, and no goals other than his work as a robber. Yet the Parker novels, written in a style so plain that “bleak” might be a better word for it, are utterly hypnotizing.

Charles Willeford, Miami Blues (1984): You never know exactly when Charles Willeford is kidding around. Miami Blues is one of his last novels, and the crime in it is incidental to the domestic problems of the detective and the criminal. Willeford’s settings ranged from art galleries to cockfighting, and his characters could be delightfully strange. Miami Blues was made into a pretty good movie, but the book captures Willeford’s eccentricities.

“Baseball provides continuity at the dinner table,” said panelist John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball and author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (Simon and Schuster, 2011). “It is our family album. It is our scrapbook. It is our lineage.”

Moderated by Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English at Fordham and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Baseball (Cambridge University Press, 2011), the panel also included Omar Minaya, former general manager of the Montreal Expos and New York Mets, Alan Schwarz, an award-winning sports reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Jacobson, professor of American studies and history at Yale.

For 90 minutes, the panel discussed such topics as the decline of African-American participation in baseball, statistical analysis, revenue sharing and whether baseball ever enjoyed a signature Golden Age—because every generation, the panel agreed, considers their respective era the game’s Golden Age.

“The Golden Age of baseball,” said Thorn, jokingly, “coincides precisely with when you happen to be 12.”

Minaya marveled about baseball fans’ sepia-toned view of the game.

“Of all the sports, there isn’t another that people can paint such a great picture of how great it was,” he said. “Baseball has a way of creating this past that is somehow greater than today.”

The majority of the discussion, however, focused on baseball’s recent Steroid Era, two decades when a percentage of players—including some of the sports’ biggest stars—took performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Surprisingly, the panelists couldn’t reach a consensus on how the era will be viewed by future fans.

“There will be fewer pitchforks and fewer torches 20 years from now,” Thorn said. “It is possible that we may come to view the Steroid Era with some sympathy. I hope so, because it is not a problem created by the players alone. Everybody has some guilt.”

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Schwarz, who has covered baseball for 20 years, wasn’t as forgiving.

“This one is at the foot of the [Major League Baseball] Players Association,” he said, “because they treated steroids as a civil rights issue rather than an entertainment issue. The thing that makes me angry is, my son is going to turn five in a couple of months. We may go to Citi Field that day and he may look up at me and say, ‘Daddy, who hit the most home runs ever?’ I won’t take pleasure in telling him. It’s not fun to say Barry Bonds, like it was to say Hank Aaron. That’s what they took from us.”

As a former scout and front office executive, Minaya admitted few people initially appreciated the extent to which players were taking performance-enhancing drugs, or how they would affect the game.

“The reality of it was,” he said, “we just didn’t know enough about it.”

Jacobsen said the continued handwringing over steroids revealed a certain level of hypocrisy, given the game’s thorny past.

“The steroid conversation is put on a different plane than other issues,” he said. “We tend not to talk about how Babe Ruth didn’t have to face the Juan Marichals and Bob Gibsons of his generation. The insistence of steroids sets up a false purity of every other record in the book.”

At one point, Minaya asked why baseball seems to be held to a higher standard than other sports.

“Baseball is a much more significant cultural institution than any of the other sports,” responded Thorn. “It is the museum of our archaic values. Whatever we believe of ourselves as Americans, not merely as baseball fans, we expect that to be mirrored in baseball. We have an ownership stake in baseball that we don’t have in the others.”

– Miles Doyle