SparkNotes - Tuesdays with Morrie

2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

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Mitch Albom was born in New Jersey in 1958, though he spent the greater part of his youth in Philadelphia. In 1979, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where met and studied under his beloved professor, Morrie Schwartz, the title character of Tuesdays With Morrie. In 1982, Albom was awarded a Masters degree from Columbia University in New York. After failed stints as an amateur boxer and nightclub musician, Albom began his career as a sports journalist, writing articles for newspapers such as the The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Detroit Free Press where he was employed from 1985 until his reunion with Morrie in 1995. Albom also has his own nationally syndicated radio show, Monday Sports Albom. In 1995, Albom began gathering notes for his book, Tuesdays With Morrie, which documents his and Morrie's discussions on the meaning of life which they hold each Tuesday of every week in Morrie's home. Albom claims to have written the book to offset Morrie's severe medical expenses, and has said in interviews that the profits from the two-year bestseller are divided between himself and the Schwartz family.

Morrie Schwartz was born in 1916. He graduated from New York's City College, and went on to win a fellowship to the University of Chicago where he was awarded a Ph.D. in sociology. In 1959, he began teaching sociology at Brandeis, a nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university, established in 1948. It was not until 1995, when he was dying from ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, that Morrie ended his career as a professor. A fatal neuromuscular disease, ALS is characterized by progressive muscle debilitation that ultimately results in paralysis. ALS is commonly known as Lou Gherig's disease, after the famous baseball player who died of the disease in 1941 at the age of forty.

Albom begins his visits to Morrie in mid-1995, during the climax of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Simpson, an acclaimed star football player, had been on trial for the June 1994, murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her acquaintance, Ronald Goldman. Simpson had pleaded "absolutely not guilty" to the double murder, although he had been known for violence against his ex-wife and had led the police in a car chase. Major controversy surrounded jury members, who were said to have been racially biased in Simpson's favor. When in October of 1995, the jury acquitted Simpson of the murder charges, the nation suffered a severe racial division, white against black, evidenced in Tuesdays With Morrie by Connie's horror at the announcement of the "not guilty" verdict.

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch recalls how the political controversies of the 1970's affected his and Morrie's years at Brandeis University. Following the nation's withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1973, and former President Nixon's resignation from office in 1974, the Brandeis campus, like many college campuses nation-wide, was a hot bed for political debate and protest. Continuing the thread of racial tension in Tuesdays With Morrie, is a story Morrie tells about an incident in which he had acted as the negotiator between the university president and a group of black students who felt that they were being oppressed by the school administration. The students had established their protesting grounds in one of the university's science buildings, and hung a banner from a window that read: "Malcolm X University." The banner paid homage to Malcolm X, a premier black leader and militant advocate of black nationalism who was assassinated in 1965.

Mitch Albom, the book's narrator, recalls his graduation from Brandeis University in the spring of 1979. After he has received his diploma, Mitch approaches his favorite professor, Morrie Schwartz, and presents him with a monogrammed briefcase. While at Brandeis, Mitch takes almost all of the sociology courses Morrie had teaches. He promises Morrie, who is crying, that he will keep in touch, though he does not fulfill his promise. Years after Mitch's graduation from Brandeis, Morrie is forced to forfeit dancing, his favorite hobby, because he has been diagnosed with ALS, a debilitating disease that leaves his "soul, perfectly awake, imprisoned inside a limp husk" of a body. Morrie's wife, Charlotte, cares for Morrie, though at his insistence, keeps her job as a professor at M.I.T.

Sixteen years after his graduation from Brandeis, Mitch is feeling frustrated with the life he has chosen to live. After his uncle dies of pancreatic cancer, Mitch abandons his failing career as a musician to become a well-payed journalist for a Detroit newspaper. Mitch promises his wife Janine that they will have children eventually, though he spends all of his time at work, away on reporting assignments. One night, Mitch is flipping the channels on his television and recognizes Morrie's voice. Morrie is being featured on the television program "Nightline" in the first of three interviews with Ted Koppel, whom he quickly befriends. Before consenting to be interviewed, Morrie surprises and softens the famed newscaster when he asks Koppel what is "close to his heart." Mitch is stunned to see his former professor on television.

Following Morrie's television appearance, Mitch contacts his beloved professor and travels from his home in Detroit to Morrie's home in West Newton, Massachusetts to visit with him. When Mitch drives up to Morrie's house, he delays greeting his professor because he is speaking on the phone with his producer, a decision he later regrets.

Shortly after his reunion with Morrie, Mitch works himself nearly to death reporting on the Wimbledon tennis tournament in London. There, he spends much time thinking about Morrie and forfeits reading the tabloids, as he now seeks more meaning in his life and knows that he will not gain this meaning from reading about celebrities and gossip. He is knocked over by a swarm of reporters chasing celebrities Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields, and it is then that Mitch realizes he is chasing after the wrong thing. When he returns to his home in Detroit, Mitch learns that the article he has worked so hard to write will not even be published, as the union he belongs to is striking against the newspaper he works for. Once more, Mitch travels to Boston to visit Morrie.

Following their first Tuesday together, Mitch returns regularly every Tuesday to listen to Morrie's lessons on "The Meaning of Life." Each week, Mitch brings Morrie food to eat, though as Morrie's condition worsens he is no longer able to enjoy solid food. In his first of three interviews with Koppel for "Nightline," Morrie admits that the thing he dreads most about his worsening condition is that someday, he will not be able to wipe himself after using the bathroom. Eventually, this fear comes true.

Interspersed throughout Mitch's visits to Morrie are flashbacks to their days together at Brandeis. Mitch describes himself as a student who had acted tough, but had sought the tenderness he recognized in Morrie. At Brandeis, Mitch and Morrie shared a relationship more like that between father and son than teacher and student. Soon before Morrie's death, when his condition has deteriorated so much that he can no longer breathe or move on his own, he confides that if he could have another son, he would choose Mitch.