A few months ago, I read David Goodwillie’s Kings County (2020), a hipster thriller that the New York Times made an Editor’s Choice and praised for its “thoughtful, appealing characters.” Audrey, a band manager, falls for Theo, who went with Colgate over Brown, Bowdoin, and Cornell to play linebacker for the Raiders.
My very next book was Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith (2025). A nod to Colgate comes when the father of the heroine announces he knows people who can get her 6-year-old brother into Colgate.
Two books, two mentions. What’s going on? What do these writers’ words mean about perceptions of Colgate? And are there other examples?
ChatGPT steered me to Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges (2010), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and praised by the New York Times as “intelligent and ambitious.” It begins with a Colgate wedding. “A wedding!” Dee writes in an exuberant opening sentence. “The first of a generation.” The bride, Cynthia, is marrying Adam, her Colgate classmate. They’re both witty, charismatic, and endowed with stunning good looks. Only 22, they are the first of their friends to marry and the first to have a baby. Their eagerness to have it all lures Adam to Wall Street and a life of crime.
Dee has written eight novels. He once spoke at a Colgate Living Writers event and said he based Adam and Cynthia on a real Colgate couple (he didn’t give names) whom he knew in the 1980s. They both worked in finance. “They had exactly the kind of charisma, of precocious adulthood — especially in their love for each other — that I wanted Adam and Cynthia to have,” he said.
Dee could have changed their alma mater but stuck with Colgate. “They needed to be very smart and high achieving in the way Colgate students are, but they also needed to be in a small enough environment that they could plausibly carry that prom-king-and-queen social energy through their time there.” He took the Colgate components and mixed them with other material having nothing to do with the real-life couple. “The opening wedding scene, for instance, takes all the details of its setting from the wedding of my college roommate.”
Kate Reynolds, the general book buyer at the Colgate Bookstore, pointed me to Deborah Harkness and her bestseller The Book of Life (2014), part of the All Souls Series. In it, Caleb Pratt is a Colgate anthropology professor who has a toddler, wears a maroon Colgate T-shirt, and buys arborio rice at Hamilton Whole Foods. Caleb is also a witch. He’s among those who, after the Salem witch trials, fled to Madison, N.Y., just on the other side of Lake Moraine from Hamilton. Madison becomes the headquarters of a global witch syndicate with offices in London, Amsterdam, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo.
In The World of All Souls, the companion guide to the set, Harkness explains that she lived in an old clapboard house in Madison during her time as a Colgate visiting professor. The house in the book grows or shrinks depending on how many witches are present. In reality the house “didn’t grow rooms,” she writes, “but it did creak and sigh.”
Reynolds also suggested Jean Hanff Korelitz, whose book The Plot (2021) is a thriller described by Stephen King as “insanely readable” and by Malcolm Gladwell as “perfectly told.” In it, Samantha is a bright and motivated 16-year-old junior at a fictional Earlville high school. Her dad is a custodian at Colgate. For years all Samantha thought about was going to Colgate on a scholarship and using her degree to get out of central New York. Her dreams are crushed when she gets pregnant.
I asked Korelitz why she chose Colgate instead of her alma mater, Dartmouth. It was convenient, she explained. She needed a small college town in the story and, because she and her husband have a weekend house near Sharon Springs, she knows the area. The only thing she got wrong was deliberate. The Colgate Inn disappears in favor of the College Inn. If you read the book, you’ll know why. A TV series is in the works. Will Colgate make the cut? To be determined, she said: “Once it goes to Hollywood, anything can happen.”
None of the writers I came across attended Colgate. Dee is a Yale man. Shteyngart was Oberlin.
In Vera, or Faith, Vera recounts a discussion she and Dylan had with their father over college. Shteyngart writes:
Daddy wanted to tell people that both his kids had gone to public school yet ended up in excellent liberal arts schools with low “student-to-faculty ratios.”
“But I hate brushing my teeth,” Dylan said when told about his future alma mater.
Why did Shteyngart pick Colgate? Was it that low student-to-faculty ratio? Was it that Colgate, as in some of the other books, represented a portal to the good life? Through his agent, Denise Shannon, I got an answer: “Colgate was chosen for toothpaste joke reasons,” she said.
More thought went into Goodwillie’s decision to feature Colgate in Kings County. Theo’s factory worker father thought his son should forgo higher education and get a job. His football coach wanted him to attend the commuter school where his son was the coach. Given the objections, “Theo’s presence at Colgate,” says the narrator, “was a minor miracle.”
Goodwillie, a Kenyon grad who played minor league baseball after graduation, told me he wanted to write about an elite school with a lot of prep school kids but not so many as to make his character feel out of place.
It’s also interesting to consider who didn’t write about Colgate. The most famous novelist to attend Colgate was the late Russell Banks, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Continental Drift (2007). Banks entered as a freshman in 1958 and quit after six weeks, with plans to find adventure in Cuba. He got as far as Lakeland, Fla. Some of his books, including his posthumous thriller American Spirits (2024), are set in upstate New York. None of his books mention Colgate.
Professor Fred Busch — who taught at Colgate for nearly 40 years, wrote 30 novels, and won the PEN/Faulkner award — didn’t write about Colgate either, at least not directly. I was among the legions who took his fiction writing class. As far as I can tell, he circles Colgate in his novels without ever landing. Harry and Catherine: A Love Story (1990) is about a hard-drinking senate aide living in the Chenango Valley. Busch mentions Route 12. He talks about an area of Madison County called East Hamilton. He does not talk about Colgate. In Girls (1997), the hero works campus security at an unidentified upstate university. He watches news on a Syracuse channel and drives through his share of snow drifts. Colgate is not found beneath the snow.
My suspicion is Busch avoided Colgate because he saw no upside. Even muddled references posed a risk. In his memoir, A Dangerous Profession (1998), he writes how he modeled a character in Rounds (1979) on a fellow professor who was also a good friend. The professor was my brilliant freshman European history professor Terrence Des Pres. When Des Pres read the book, he broke off their friendship. Busch writes how Des Pres didn’t like being described as anything “less than heroic.” Busch was sad about the loss.
Busch was, of course, an avid reader, so it’s unfortunate we can’t get his take on the novels I mentioned. Here’s my take: Harkness has it right. Colgate is a magical place where those talented and lucky enough to be there find themselves transformed and elevated, if not by a witch’s spell, then by the others — the students and the faculty — passing through the enchanted haven. The football player, the aspiring financier, the custodian’s daughter, the father of the kid who brushes with Colgate: They recognize that Colgate opens a door to an interesting life, a privileged life, and even a life worthy of a bestseller.
Greg Steinmetz’s third book, The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon and the Triumph of Big Government (Simon & Schuster), will appear in 2026.