Malcolm Bradbury The History Man

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Bernard Malamud, one of the triumvirate of prominent Jewish writers (the others are Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) specialized in the human condition, not the campus situation. But he, too, paid his dues as a college instructor and later used his experience to animate an overlooked novel, /A New Life/. The protagonist, Seymour Levin, is a New Yorker who snags a job teaching in the West (Malamud once taught at a college in Oregon.) Levin's very first class sets the anticlimactic tone. As the students listen to him raptly he reflects: The young people "shared ideals of seeking knowledge, one and indivisible. 'This is the life for me,' he admitted, and they broke into cheers, whistles, loud laughter. The bell rang and the class moved noisily into the hall, some nearly convulsed As if inspired, Levin glanced down at his fly , and it was, as it must be, all the way open." Malamud's gentle humor touches on Levin's late awakening of love, as well as on the professor's melancholia when he realizes he's "engaged in a great irrelevancy, teaching people how to write who don't know what to write." An overlooked work, low-key but perceptive and witty.

David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man | Books | The Guardian

The title of Malcolm Bradbury's third novel, published in 1975, has become a proverbial phrase, invoked in journalistic headlines and echoed by other writers (eg Alan Bennett's The History Boys) without any thematic reference to its source. To understand why The History Man impressed itself so deeply on the British collective consciousness and the English language, the novel itself must be placed in its historical context - or contexts (for there were two).

Bradbury is often labelled a "campus novelist", but in his work, as in all the best examples of the genre, the small world of the university is a stage for the dramatisation and examination of larger issues. The History Man is set almost entirely in and around the University of Watermouth, a fictitious town on the south coast of England, but it dealt with an international phenomenon, the movement for revolutionary change in social, political and cultural life which erupted in western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s, and set the progressive agenda until it ran out of steam at the end of the 70s. It was a complex phenomenon, made up of many different elements from Marxism and Maoism to rock music and recreational drugs, but it was essentially a rebellion of youth against a patriarchal old order, largely inspired by middle-aged gurus, and launched from the expanding universities of the post-war world.