 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".Lurie's novel, in fact, is only loosely based on the real people and events of the tumultuous 1960s, and her characters are the more devastating for being types rather than recognizable portraits.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.