“Anyone who read this story would know who I was” (127). So says the narrator of Old School as he finishes typing “Summer Dance,” the story that will win him a chance to meet with his idol,  Ernest Hemingway. The irony, of course, is that the narrator has—by anyone’s standards, including his own—stolen “Summer Dance” from another writer, a young woman at another school, literally retyping her story while making only those changes needed to identify him rather than her as its author.

Please write a brief essay (750 words or so) in which you try to make sense of this charged and troubling moment in the novel. The narrator of Old School is, after all, a pretty likable, and it would seem, honest young man. So how could copying someone else’s work possibly feel authentic or true to him (even if he later regrets his decision)? How might his plagiarism be connected to his (and the other boys’) baldfaced attempts to imitate authors like Frost, Rand, and Hemingway? How might it be connected to the misimpression that Dean Makepeace almost allows to destroy his career? How might it be connected to the stunning appropriation of the Bible that Wollf ends his novel with?

What I hope is not that you will answer each of the questions above, one after the next, but that you will use them to reflect on what Old School suggests about the links between imitation, plagiarism, and identity.

I look forward to reading what you have to say. Please post your essay to Dropbox by 9:00 am on Fri, 1/27.