In a hallway hidden in the back of Goldwin Smith Hall, there is a worn metal plaque that hangs outside a certain office. It reads: “The writer Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 occupied this office during his tenure at Cornell University 1948-1959.”

Prof. Kenneth McClane ’73, English, who also received his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell and is the current W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature, has occupied that office for six or seven years. The space, however, has not lost its magic for the veteran professor and author, as it continues to humble its current occupant.

“Every once in awhile someone knocks on the door,” McClane said. “He or she comes in and they want to just come into the office, into the sanctuary. … Mr. Nabokov was probably like George Washington in that he had a lot of offices, but yet again people will come in. Sometimes people will be moved to tears, and that’s really quite powerful. In fact, I’ve actually had to excuse myself at times because their sense of an identification with him is so powerful.”

Nabokov — who wrote the famously infamous Lolita while teaching at Cornell — is not the only notable author affiliated with this university. Creative writing has a long and storied tradition on the East Hill: ranging from E.B. White ’21, who brought classics such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little to life, to literary icon Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ’44 to 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz MFA ’95; from two of the women who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature — Pearl Buck MA ’25 and Toni Morrison MFA ’55 — to the bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger ’99.

But when Prof. J. Robert Lennon, English, tried to think of a common thread running through Cornell’s tradition of creative writing, he came to the realization that the only thing the writers have in common is that “they’re all unusual. They’re all innovators.”

In fact, the Creative Writing Program has something special planned this semester to commemorate its history and tradition of quirky personalities. The English department offered its first creative writing course as part of the curriculum in 1905, and the “Centennial Plus Five Celebration of Creative Writing at Cornell” will recognize over 100 years of consistent creative writing offerings since then with a reading series featuring the return of several alumni authors, as well as several other events recognizing past and present Cornell authors.

Alluding to the illustrious history of the Creative Writing Program, McClane said, “This is a place where you know that E.B. White was here. Even if you don’t know a whole lot about E.B. White, there’s a sense that writing always mattered here.”

With the celebration, the program answers the question of whether writing still matters here. Díaz, who won the 2008 Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, will be on campus today and tomorrow to join in the festivities. And, thanks to an English department initiative of self-examination, there is at least one group of students who will be going to Díaz’s reading as a part of their official Cornell education.

Tapping into the sense of respect and even reverence for the literary giants who have walked these halls the department offers a course every year called The Great American Cornell Novel. Prof. Molly Hite, English, helms the class. Hite — a scholar of the works of author Thomas Pynchon ’59 — has taught at Cornell since 1982, working side-by-side with figures such as renowned poet A.R. Ammons. Ammons was a Cornell professor from 1964 to 1998, who died in 2001.

“The idea [of the course] is that, first of all, for people to see what an incredibly rich variety of people have come out of Cornell,” Hite said. “It’s really astonishing. This is one of the great breeding grounds of 20th century fiction. I’m basically teaching a course on contemporary American literature, it just happens that every writer has a connection to Cornell.”

And that connection can often be seen in the works of Cornell’s family of authors. Part I of The Great American Cornell Novel syllabus is titled “Novels set at (a place kind of like) Cornell University” and includes Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by dropout Richard Fariña ’59, The War Between the Tates by the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature Emerita Alison Lurie (who began teaching at Cornell in 1970) and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, all of which are “set right here — all certainly disguised but not very much,” according to Hite.

A chase scene at the end of Pale Fire takes place in the A.D. White Library, the oldest part of Uris Library.

“At one point,” Hite said, “[the two characters in the scene] disturb a rather thick looking man in a Hawaiian shirt, and that’s Nabokov.”

The very first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 refers to Cornell by name and nostalgically mentions watching sunsets from “the library slope.”

Ammons also based much of his poetry on the physical characteristics of Cornell, even authoring the “Ode to Wee Stinky” in honor of the stream between Sage and Day Halls. Yet the University’s influence on these famed authors goes deeper than fleeting references.

“He wrote poems about places all around here,” Hite said. “He was a wonderful poet of nature, a philosopher of nature.”

The works of some Cornell-affiliated writers, on the other hand, haves focused more on the chaos of humanity. Richard Fariña left school in 1959, his senior year, but not before gathering the material that would become his one and only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. The piece — representative of the turmoil of the 60s and almost entirely set at a place like Cornell — was published just two days before Fariña died in a motorcycle accident.

When Pynchon wrote a forward for the 1983 reissue of Fariña’s book, much of it was devoted to reminiscing about Cornell. These talented writers associated with each other as students in that time, some more than others. Kirkpatrick Sale ’58, a former Sun editor, was a close friend of Fariña and corresponded with Pynchon years after graduation, according to Hite.

“[Pynchon is] very secretive and doesn’t get interviewed,” she said, “but a bunch of his letters turned up in the archive at Texas, which has a big modernist archive, and when I was down there I read them. … [The letters] were really interesting to me because the two people who were writing, Pynchon and Kirk Sale, constantly refer to their professors [and] to classes they had. … Cornell was very, very important to someone like Pynchon.”

Cornell is where authors like Pynchon developed intellectually as well as socially. Pynchon, for one, started out in the sciences — he studied engineering physics before he switched to English after taking two years off from school to serve in the U.S. Navy. McClane pointed to Cornell’s variety of colleges as another factor in the development of writers, with chemistry major Vonnegut as the prime example of a writer whose style was the result of study in completely different disciplines. Vonnegut was also a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity — continuing in the tradition of E.B. White, who was president of the Cornell chapter of Phi Gamma Delta.

Some authors, however, identified more with the house-party scene of Collegetown than the Greek system.

“[In] Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, he satirized Collegetown — called Lairville — and all the students that are in fraternities and sororities, and it’s sort of about free-thinking college students,” said a student in The Great Amerian Cornell Novel, Drew Fister ’11.

The politics of the campus influenced authors, as the authors themselves also affected campus politics.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Díaz was instrumental in a mid-1990s movement to improve Latino Studies and the Latino experience at Cornell. That struggle has seeped into his literary style, according to the Cornell professors who have followed his career with interest.

“I knew [Díaz] not as a student,” Hite said, “but as someone who I talked to all the time. What we talked about would be the Latino/a demonstrations going on on campus at the time, which were some of the most effective demonstrations in my 25 years at Cornell, now that I think about it. And he was a leader in this movement.”

“When I read Oscar Wao, that kind of brash narrative voice that’s in there reminds me very much of Junot kind of coming to understand his [own] politics. The Latino politics were very diverse and graded, and there were issues of class and origin.”

“[His narrators are] deeply conflicted, and I find that very interesting,” Lennon added. “I think [Díaz is] a guy who straddles two worlds, and that tension shows up in his work a great deal. … Junot’s fiction is a seemingly impossible combination of toughness and bravado combined with utter nerdiness. It’s both extremely informal but also erudite, and it’s hard to bring all those elements together.”

Díaz takes an eclectic approach that seems to be common among Cornell authors.

“When you go in [Díaz’s] library,” according to Prof. Ernesto Quiñonez, English, “you’ll see Lord Byron right next to an issue of Batman.”

“We’ve had some great innovators,” Lennon said, “Nabokov and Vonnegut and Pynchon, people who are identified with [being] not just great storytellers, but people who are responsible for really adventurous excursions as you enter the boundaries of fiction.”

Perhaps the best example of such an “excursion” is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the book that Hite just finished teaching in The Great American Cornell Novel and for which the lounge in the second floor hallway of Goldwin Smith Hall is named.

There is no easy way to explain Pale Fire, even for an aficionado like Lennon who considers the work to be one of the foundations of his own style.

Lennon tried to summarize: “It’s so geeky. … It essentially takes the form of a fake concordance to a fake poem by a fake poet named John Shade, and of course Nabokov wrote the poem. … It’s also notes on the poem, so the novel seems like a reference book on the poem, but in fact the guy who’s telling the story is almost accidentally telling you the story of his relationship to the poet. And in the end you begin to realize that the guy telling the story is actually crazy.”

Hite has taken complaints from students about the “silliness” of the work, and she understands the students’ concerns.

“It’s hard to find a place to [get hooked and become] passionate because it’s so clever and crafty and keeps thwarting you,” Hite said.

Aside from early work such as The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon is also notorious for his bizarre style. Readers have struggled with this piece and others coming from Cornellians because of the experimental attitude of the authors.

Then again, the famously quirky Vonnegut is a household name as the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, and works by Nabokov and Pynchon made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 all-time greatest English language works from 1923 (when Time Magazine began) to the present. Somehow, these authors have not completely sacrificed accessibility in order to revolutionize the field of fiction.

“Vonnegut is the one who everybody reads,” Hite said. “Everyone knows Vonnegut. When he died [in 2007], people came running up to the English department.”

A form of the elusive, deceptive structure of Nabokov, Pynchon and Vonnegut lives on in modern Cornellian authors as well. Bestselling author Melissa Bank MFA ’88, who is a visiting professor in the Creative Writing Program this semester, has ignored the constraints of a traditional plot in her pieces, including The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

“There’s no plot per se,” Lennon said of Bank’s work. “There’s this mysterious forward momentum. You don’t even know if you’re going somewhere until you’ve arrived there. [Bank’s books are] very accessible books and very popular, but they’re actually quite unconventional.”

Over the past century, several eminent authors on the Cornell faculty have seen their students do great things as well. Walter Slatoff, an English professor at Cornell from 1955 to 1989, taught Pynchon and saw greatness in him, talking him up to his colleagues. Pynchon’s short story “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” was published in the Cornell literary journal Epoch during his last semester in Ithaca.

“I believe Walter Slatoff was teaching him in a 280 class,” McClane said, “which is the beginning [creative writing] class, when a very amazing story called [Mortality and Mercy in Vienna] came up. And I remember Walter saying to me, ‘When I saw that story, I knew we were confronting one of the greatest writers of the century.’”

Students, on the other hand, have had their own unique way of lavishing this kind of praise on the poet Ammons.

“When [his book-length poem] Garbage got [the 1993 National Book Award], students festooned his office with trash,” Hite recalled.

Affectionately known as “Archie,” the longtime professor was a harsh critic of others’ work at times, according to his colleague Hite, but he was also loved by decades worth of students. Ammons taught Alice Fulton, now the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English, as well as McClane. Ammons even chaired McClane’s graduate committee, and it was Ammons who taught McClane about poetry’s place in society: “I admired that he felt that poets were, however menaced, of inestimable value to society, that no matter how dispossessed we might be ... it was we who held society's secrets. Archie always felt that poets were to be honored, loved and celebrated. And in this loveless world, that was a great consolation.”

Not only did Cornell love Ammons but Ammons also reciprocated.

“He was a very difficult man to know well,” McClane said, “a true genius, but those of us who knew him loved him. And loved him, as he loved us. Some people teach you about the world because they know things about it; some people, just as powerfully, become the world, as if they had renegotiated its axial tilt. Archie was of this latter group.”

The MacArthur Fellowship — the Genius Grant — recognizes individuals for their creativity, giving each a sum of money with no strings attached. Ammons was in the first class of awardees back in 1981 and used much of the money to benefit his department’s graduate students.

“When [Ammons] got the MacArthur genius award,” Hite said, “he used quite a bit of it to sponsor MFA program students for fellowships so they would have more time to write.

Archie didn’t want to be free to do anything, he wanted to come in everyday.”

As it turns out, generations of important authors have not been able to keep Cornell out of their writing — just like Ammons, Pynchon, Vonnegut and so many others, they couldn’t stop thinking of those labyrinthine libraries, college traditions or Libe Slope sunsets