In Plato's Cave Alvin B. Kernan

In this candid and delightful memoir, Alvin Kernan recalls his life as a student, professor, provost, and dean during turbulent decades of change in the hallowed halls of Columbia, Williams, Oxford, Yale, and Princeton. His vividly remembered account is a unique personal story and more---it is also a history of what has been won, and lost, in the culture wars of the second half of the twentieth-century.

Alvin Kernan is senior advisor in the humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

"With its striking qualities of clarity and candor, Kernan's book is a record not only of a highly distinguished career but of the extraordinary developments during that career in some of the most distinguished American university departments of literature. This is an important book." Frank Kermode "[An] immensely engrossing memoir...[This book] is chock-full of incidents and anecdotes that shed light on the people, events and social trends that transformed the very meaning of a higher education." Merle Rubin, Wall Street Journal "Within the framework of a memoir a most engaging and thoughtful memoir Alvin Kernan has written a book about the 'tectonic shifts' in American higher education since the end of World War II." Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World "I can think of no more agreeable way to be introduced to the culture wars of the past half century than through this witty memoir. This is not only a record of the aspirations, illusions, and follies of academia; it is a wise and eminently readable intellectual history of our time." Gertrude Himmelfarb