Jay Cantor ’70 says that “nine-tenths of the people in your Harvard class who are acting like self-important little monsters will grow up to be nothing but perfectly average self-important monsters. A small percentage will grow up to be the artists that they’re acting as if they already are.”

It’s impossible to know whether Cantor himself was a “little monster” in his Crimson days—but he certainly has grown up to be an artist.

His new magnum opus, the 704-page epic Great Neck, centers around a group of friends who grow up in the prosperous Long Island town of the same name and go on to participate in the political opposition movements of the 1960s. Much of the novel is loosely based on the history of the country and of Cantor himself.

Cantor, now an English professor at Tufts and a MacArthur fellow, was raised in the New York suburb that once knew the debauchery of The Great Gatsby and later saw another kind of wealth—one which flooded in from Queens as second-generation American Jews did well for themselves after the war.

Cantor’s undergraduate years at Harvard, which coincided with perhaps the most tumultuous period in the history of the University, are also reflected in the novel, as four of the six Great Neck kids move to Cambridge for college.

Myself a Harvard student from Great Neck, I had lunch with Cantor at the Hi-Rise Bread Company near Radcliffe Quad. He describes the café as a second home for his family, who lives just down the street.

Even the “Amazing Grace” sandwich, Cantor claims, is named for his daughter.

Over lunch, Cantor discussed the relationship between the fiction and reality of Great Neck and about Cantor’s time at Harvard.

Cantor, who is also a Crimson editor, says many of the most outrageous events described in the book are based on actual historical record.

Beth, the character around whom much of the action revolves, is a member of the Weather Underground, a group of revolutionary communists who did not shy away from violent protest.

The book also explores Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, the 1964 campaign to enfranchise black voters, from the perspectives of both black leaders and white volunteers. Cantor says that as far as he knows, his description is true.

“The organizers of Freedom Summer knew that when they invited white people down to help, there would be white casualties. I mention that because it seems shocking to many people, but it really was the case,” he says. “The people in Mississippi knew that without white casualties, the whites weren’t going to notice.”

In the novel, Cantor depicts an incident in which Beth’s comrades accidentally detonate an explosive within their own headquarters in New York, resulting in the death of many Weathermen. In reality, March 1970 saw the explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse in which members of the group were killed.

Despite its accurate portrayal of the past, the novel is not directly about history, but instead “about the fantasies that made the history,” according to Cantor.

But history is a major theme within the book, especially as it relates to guilt, Cantor says.