Throughout history, American literature has provided an escape from the classroom; yet authors like Twain, Melville, and Ellison remain key figures in high school and college curricula. This book offers an account of this paradox, examining the contentious but ultimately generative relationship between literary and scholastic culture in the US. Schools of Fiction returns us to the shaky beginnings of US higher education to tell the compelling story of how novels about the "real world" helped legitimize these nascent institutions. In this expansive study, detailed microhistories of secret societies, publicity offices, credit hours, and course electives illuminate both popular and canonical works of American and African American fiction. Sailing through the Scylla of institutionalism and the Charybdis of literary formalism, Day Frank shows us how to write literary and educational history together-how what was on the syllabus mattered to the young universities in which American literature was first taught.