Harvard University in The Mansion (Location)

Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the oldest university in the U.S. Both Gavin Stevens and his nephew Charles Mallison go there for college - Charles because, as he puts it, it was his uncle's idea "to send me all the way to Cambridge, Mass for what we laughingly call an education" (215). While there, Charles is in the Reserve Officer Training Program, and intends to apply for membership in "Porcellian" (214), one of the oldest and most exclusive undergraduate clubs in the country, having been founded in the late 18th century. He is also college friends with a young man named Spoade, whose "father had been at Harvard back in 1909 with Uncle Gavin" (229). Readers of Faulkner might be startled to read that date, because that is also exactly when Quentin Compson, the best-known Harvard student in his Yoknapatawpha cast, was at the college, as narrated in detail in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Mansion mentions Quentin as the Compson who attended Harvard but "committed suicide at the end of his freshman year" (354); it does not explain how Gavin and Quentin could have been there at the same time and yet never met.