Pictures from an Institution

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) is the author of six volumes of poetry and the recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry in 1961. Pictures from an Institution is his only novel.

"A most literate account of a group of most literate people by a writer of power.... A delight of true understanding." - Wallace Stevens "I'm greatly impressed by the real fun, the incisive satire, the closeness of observation, and in the end by a kind of sympathy and human warmth. It's a remarkable book." - Robert Penn Warren "Move over Dorothy Parker. Pictures... is less a novel than a series of poisonous portraits, set pieces, and endlessly quotable put-downs. Read it less for plot than sharp satire, Jarrell's forte." - Mary Welp "One of the wittiest books of modern times." - New York Times "The father of the modern campus novel, and the wittiest of them all. Extraordinary to think that 'political correctness' was so deliciously dissected fifty years ago." - Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph "A sustained exhibition of wit in the great tradition.... Immensely and very devastatingly shrewd." - Edmund Fuller, Saturday Review "This is a searching novel about a mean lady novelist writing a mean novel about a college where she is spending a year teaching creative writing. It portrays a savage, lethal-tongued bluestocking, pitilessly intent on pinning down her colleagues as specimens in her already gruesome collection.... Mr. Jarrell is on the side of the angels. His is a divine meanness, and he exposes his female writing devil punitively, matching her stream of poisonous wisecracks with a series of coruscating cracks of his own worthy of Dorothy Parker at her most hilarious and deadly." - Francis Steegmuller, New York Times Book Review"