The fantasy novelist Lev Grossman ’91, the author of the bestselling Magicians trilogy and the 2024 Arthurian fable The Bright Sword, entered his undergraduate Harvard years as a chemistry major but, in his words, “didn’t last very long.” Reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in a first-year seminar on modernist fiction, Grossman says, “I instantly understood how it worked in a way that I would never understand electron orbitals. I understood that this was what my mind was set up to analyze.” It would take some time for Grossman to pin down his style and genre. But he’d discovered his literary gift.
Publications began trickling out as Grossman became a debut author and a journalist at TIME. He found lasting success with The Magicians, a 2009 fantasy novel that subverted the collective tropes of Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. It centered around a magical school in upstate New York called Brakebills, a bit like Hogwarts if everyone had gone through puberty and joined a hard-partying frat.
Grossman had originally angled his style toward “serious” fiction and its accompanying criticism. In his student days, he says, “I would have been quite startled to know that I would one day acquire a reputation as a fantasy novelist.” After the Magicians trilogy was adapted into a critically acclaimed, five-season show on the Syfy channel—and with The Bright Sword under development as a television series—Grossman’s reputation is here to stay. Now living in Sydney, Australia, he seems at ease with his standing in the writing world. In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, he spoke about the ongoing ascendance of the fantasy genre, the allegorical durability of King Arthur, and the Ivy League energy that inspired his famous magical school.
The fantasy genre has gained a huge cultural foothold in the past few decades. Could you have ever imagined, back in the ’90s, where it would be now?
It seemed like such a private, niche enthusiasm, right? People reading Tolkien and Lewis. What changed all of that, for better or worse, was Harry Potter. I never would have believed that we could have a global media phenomenon about a kid going to magic school. It turns out that practically everybody is a fantasy fan. They just had to be coached out of the woodwork.
Do you think The Magicians played a role in mainstreaming the genre?
The Magicians followed in the wake of writers like Susanna Clark [Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell] and George R.R. Martin [A Game of Thrones], who were interested in ways of making fantasy more self-aware, of pushing it into places it hadn’t gone before and using it to address things that, I think in the past, we thought were more the province of literary fiction. I think The Magicians was part of that. In retrospect, I realize it was what we now call ‘dark academia.’ The phrase did not exist then. It was one of the early texts that participated in that subject.
There’s a common conjecture that fantasy has gotten so popular because readers want escapism. Do you attribute its popularity there, or elsewhere?
I think it’s not about escape, but that fantasy is dealing with questions that feel increasingly urgent. It’s funny, because no one in their right mind would attempt to escape to Westeros [the fictional world of A Game of Thrones]. They would have a terrible time. They’re going to Westeros in order to re-encounter some of the challenges and problems that they see in the world around them, in a way that makes them more comprehensible and processable.
Related to worldly challenges, The Bright Sword uses Arthurian fables as a kind of allegory— I’m mainly thinking of the rift between native Britons and the fading Roman Empire. There are so many contemporary parallels here. Was that element always the main thrust of the book?
The Arthur story is something that people have been telling and retelling for something like 1,400 years. It’s an incredibly durable story, and I think part of what makes it so durable is the way that different aspects of it resonate in different time periods. For T. H. White [The Once and Future King], it’s very much about the shadow of the World Wars, the problem of violence and warfare and what it means. When I reread Le Morte d’Arthur [a fifteenth-century work by Thomas Mallory], I saw that Arthur was living in a post-colonial nation, and many of his problems were aftershocks of imperial oppression by the Romans. What made it even more complex is that Arthur was really on the side of the Romans. And so he had a journey to go on to understand his own personal history, but also the history of Britain as a nation. That resonated for me as something that was very relevant.
You’ve had a few forays into Hollywood thus far in your career, including 2021’s The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. Is that a well you want to keep going back to?
If it ever seems as though I’m not interacting with Hollywood, what I’m doing is writing something that never gets off the ground. Fantasy is very cheap to write but expensive to produce. Something like Game of Thrones, it’s $15 million an episode. The horses cost a lot of money. Novels are always going to be my mother tongue, but it’s fascinating to work in visual media with other people who have good ideas. And it reaches places that books don’t always reach.
Is there any sort of Harvard-Brakebills connection? What influence did the Ivy League have on your school in The Magicians?
There’s a very real connection. I mean, Harvard is an incredible place for many reasons, but one is that it’s just such an incredible psychological menagerie. The types of personalities who wind up there are dynamic and intense and unusual. People tend to be driven by all kinds of different things, and watching those people bounce off each other is something you never forget. People [who] go to Harvard, those are the kind of people who would go to a college of magic.
