He is an admirer and scholar of the work of George Kennan, the diplomat who devised President Harry Truman's policy of containment of the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War.

The fictional Corinth University, with its setting of creeks flowing through deep gorges, gracious but not always comfortable academic buildings, and its shabby college town, is obviously modeled on Cornell.

In a 2005 interview in the Cornell Chronicle, Lurie maintained that her novel had been a composite: The events in The War Between the Tates, her 1974 roman à clef of the marital (and extramarital) travails of a professor and his wife, 'happened to people I know, but it happened at three different universities.

'"[2] Nearly 25 years later, her colleague, Jonathan Culler, jokingly mentioned the fear in the Cornell English department that she might write a sequel to The War Between the Tates.

Although she was at Cornell during the famous protests by black students in April 1969, the topics dealt with in her book are feminism, the woes of parenthood, infidelity, and academic pomposity— not race relations.

In the novel, the character Dibble is outraged because the administration has failed to call for military assistance to deal with the protesters, in his mind thereby compromising "professorial dignity".