Erich Segal - The Class

D ANNY R OSSI , the musical prodigy, risks all for Harvard, even a break with his domineering father. Yet his real problems are too much fame too soonand too many women.

T ED L AMBROS spends his four years as a commuter, an outsider. He is obsessed by his desire to climb to the top of the Harvard academic ladder, heedless of what it will cost him in personal terms.

J ASON G ILBERT , the Golden Boyhandsome, charismatic, a brilliant athletelearns at Harvard that he cannot ignore his Jewish background. Only in tragedy will he find his true identity.

G EORGE K ELLER , a refugee from Communist Hungary, comes to Harvard with the barest knowledge of English. But with ruthless determination, he masters not only the language but the power structure of his new country.

A NDREW E LIOT is haunted by three centuries of Harvard ancestors who cast giant shadows on his confidence. It is not until the sad and startling events of the reunion that he learns his value as a man.

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THE CLASS

This is a novel about fictional members of The Harvard Class of 1958. The author has included the Eliot family in the background for his story because that distinguished family has a long and proud relationship with Harvard University. But the fictional character of Andrew Eliot is not intended to portray or refer to any actual member of the Eliot family, whether living or dead. All of the main characters in this novel are creations of the authors imagination. These characters illustrate some of the divergent directions taken by young men of this generation into the fields of politics, the arts, intellectual life, or in voyages of self-discovery. In tracing their years at Harvard, and thereafter until their 25th Reunion, the author portrays a number of events in which public figures from American political and artistic life appear. He has included portrayals of these public personalities as symbols of certain influences of the past twenty-five years. The reader should understand that the specific conversations and incidents involving these personalities are the authors own creations.

THE CLASS
A Bantam Book

Publishing History
Bantam hardcover edition / May 1985
Bantam paperback edition / February 1986

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1985 Ploys, Inc. for the United States and its dependencies. Canada and The Philippines.
Copyright 1985 Dewsbury International, Inc. for the rest of the world.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

ISBN 0-553-27090-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5321-8

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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There must be some possible ground in reason for ones boiling over with joy that one is a son of Harvard, and was not, by some unspeakably horrible accident of birth, predestined to graduate at Yale or at Cornell.

WILLIAM JAMES,

M.D., 1869

May 12, 1983

My Harvard Twenty-fifth Reunion is next month and I am scared to death.

Scared to face all my successful classmates, walking back on paths of glory, while I have nothing to show for my life except a few gray hairs.

Today a heavy, red-bound book arrived that chronicles all the achievements of The Class of 58. It really brought home my own sense of failure.

I stayed up half the night just staring at the faces of the guys who once were undergraduates with me, and now are senators and governors, world-famous scientists and pioneering doctors. Who knows which of them will end up on a podium in Stockholm? Or the White House lawn?

And whats amazing is that some are still married to their first wives.

A few of the most glittering successes were close friends of mine. The roommate I once thought of as a fruitcake is the candidate likeliest to be our next Secretary of State. The future President of Harvard is a guy I used to lend my clothes to. Another, whom we barely noticed, has become the musical sensation of our age.

The bravest of them all laid down his life for something he believed in. His heroism humbles me.

And I return, resplendent in my disappointment.

I am the last Eliot of a great line to enter Harvard. My ancestors were all distinguished men. In war, in peace, in church, in science, and in education. As recently as 1948, my cousin Tom received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But the brilliance of the family tradition has grown dim with me. I dont even hold a candle to Jared Eliot (Class of 1703), the man who introduced rhubarb to America.

Yet I do have one tenuous connection with my noble forebears. They were diarists. My namesake, Reverend Andrew Eliot, 37, while bravely tending his parishioners, kept a daily recordstill extantdescribing what the Revolutionary War was like during the siege of Boston in 1776.

The moment the city was liberated, he hurried to a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers to move that General George Washington be given an honorary doctorate.

His son inherited his pulpit and his pen, leaving a vivid account of Americas first days as a republic.

Naturally, theres no comparison, but Ive been keeping notebooks all my life as well. Maybe thats the single remnant of my heritage. Ive observed history around me, even if I didnt make any of it.

Meanwhile, Im still scared as hell.

We took the world as given. Cigarettes

Were twenty-several cents a pack, and gas

As much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber

And veiled in supernatural scruplescall

Them chivalry.

Psychology was in the mind; abstract

Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life

Worth living was the private life, andlast,

Worst scandal in this characterization

We did not know we were a generation.

JOHN UPDIKE

CLASS OF 1954

T hey glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked.

It was Monday, September 20, 1954. Eleven hundred sixty-two of the best and brightest young men in the world were lined up outside that monstrous Victorian Gothic structure known as Memorial Hall. To register as members of the future Harvard Class of 58.

Running the sartorial spectrum from Brooks Brothers to hand-me-downs, they were variously impatient, terrified, blas, and numb. Some had traveled thousands of miles, others a few blocks. Yet all knew that they were now merely at the beginning of the greatest journey of their lives.

Shadrach Tubman, son of the president of Liberia, flew from Monrovia via Paris to New Yorks Idlewild Airport, whence he was driven to Boston in his Embassys limousine.