MIT in Popular Culture - Written Works

Written Works

Also see References in the main article, and the bibliography maintained by MIT's Institute Archives & Special Collections

Nonfiction works have examined MIT, its history, and its various subcultures. In addition to books like Nightwork, which recount the Institute's hacking tradition, Benson Snyder's The Hidden Curriculum (1970) describes the state of MIT student and faculty psychology in the late 1960s. Noted physicist and raconteur Richard Feynman built up a collection of anecdotes about his MIT undergraduate years, several of which are retold in his loose memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Some of this material was incorporated into Matthew Broderick's film Infinity (1996), in addition to Feynman stories from Far Rockaway, Princeton University, and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

On the fiction side, the novel The Gadget Maker (1955, by Maxwell Griffith) traces the life of aeronautical engineer Stanley Brack, who performs his undergraduate studies at MIT. Ben Bova's novel The Weathermakers (1966) about scientists developing methods to prevent hurricanes from reaching land, is also set in part at MIT. Patricia Vasquez visits (or comes from) MIT in Greg Bear's Eon (1985). Neal Stephenson coyly hints at MIT in Quicksilver (2004), and other books of The Baroque Cycle, by having Daniel Waterhouse found the "Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of the Technologickal Arts" in the 18th century.

Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" begins with architecture student Howard Roark being expelled from the fictional Stanton Institute of Technology. As that institute is depicted as being located in a seashore suburb of Boston, it seems that MIT - specifically, its School of Architecture - was meant. Rand might have considered it prudent to use a fictional name, as the institute is depicted in a highly unflattering way in her book.