Paul Luchessa

A Spy at Harvard: a Novel Paul Luchessa

It was 1964 and the Sixties were just revving up. Like Jay Gatsby in another romantic era, Mark Panokotonkis came east seeking fame, riches and the love of a society girl. Yet it was not in New York and the Hamptons where Panokotonkis sought his destiny, but in the ivied halls of tradition-laden Harvard. The California golden boy was to have his dreams hijacked by the war and the student movement that rose up against it. Lusting for the Harvard Lampoon, the ultra-exclusive Porcellian Club and their mandarin preppie membership, he finds himself instead enmeshed in the grubby anti-establishment SDS, pitted against his freshman nemesis, David Siegfried, himself a dreamer with big ideas, seeking a very different destiny-social upheaval and revolution, the destruction of capitalism and the old order-everything that Harvard epitomized. The opposite but complimentary fates of these two wide-eyed boys from the west unfold against the backdrop of a Harvard that only exists in the fading memories of aging alumni lost in the era within the context of no context.