Archive >> Spring 2004

"On the Same Page Lehigh", a reading program sponsored by the Lehigh University Friends of the Libraries and Library and Technology Services, chose The Dante Club for its third book, featured during the spring semester of 2004.

The young author, Matthew Pearl, who will visit the campus in late March, cites Lehigh University’s English professor Scott Paul Gordon as his mentor. Pearl and Gordon were at Harvard University together, Pearl as an undergraduate and Gordon as a graduate student and teaching assistant.

Pearl has set his novel in 1865 Boston where a group of literary giants formed the actual Dante Club. Poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, publisher J. T. Fields, and Harvard scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. joined together to produce the first American translation of Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

In Pearl’s novel the members realize that a serial killer in the area is re-enacting the various punishments in Dante’s Inferno, part one of the Divine Comedy. Perhaps only they can solve the mystery.

See the section About the Program for tips on how to find a copy of our current book.

Interviews, Reviews, Interpretation, etc.

thedanteclub.com
Reviews and other resources on publisher's Web site.

Library Exhibit

Dante Club Reunion
This exhibition brings to life the real literary figures who are members of the Dante Club by displaying some of their publications held by Lehigh’s libraries.