Class Notes: A Novel
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Description
Class Notes is a bittersweet and witty novel of a young girl coming of age in America, on both the opposite edges of the continent. Her path to womanhood lies on a collision course between the fifties and the sixties, and their impact would change her and America forever. Harriet Elizabeth Springer is raised in a Pacific Northwest fishing town in a home torn between her father's limited pragmatism and her mother's ambitious idealism. Handsome, intelligent, restless, she yearns to belong, but the rules baffle her, the boys shun her, and Northville stifles her. Nearly everyone in Northville was pleased to have settled there for life. I clamored to get out, to a place where people read books before the Reader's Digest condensed them. So, armed with one State Good Citizenship Award and three Miss Sweetheart Intelligence Prizes, Harriet leaves hayrides and heavy petting for the domain of the rich and the worldly-wise. If Northville was the final bastion of the fifties, eastern, exclusive Harwyn College was the outpost of liberalism. There, her circle numbers the flighty Naomi from Uruguay; big, bold marriage-shy Amarillo from Texas; and the inevitable French seducer, Jean Maurin. And most diquieting and mysteriously compelling of them all is the beautiful army brat, Sloan Trouver, who draws Harriet into choices that she and the decade still spoke of in whispers. The most trying testing ground of all proves to be New York City, where Harriet goes in search of a career. She anxiously experiments with liberal politics and controversial sexual liaisons. But most important, she learns the pain and satisfaction of making solitary decisions and of finding a meaning for her womanhood that the world was only on the brink of embracing.
Publication Date
1979
Recommended Citation
Stimpson, Catharine R., "Class Notes: A Novel" (1979). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 715.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/715
