Illegally entering the dean's office at night through a steam tunnel
that once stored the bodies of students who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic may seem ill advised. But to do so in search of evidence that the university president had sacrificed innocent faculty to save his own skin during the McCarthy witch hunts risks immediate expulsion. And yet undergraduate Adam Swan, enlisting the help of Margot Marcus, a beautiful young instructor in the Italian Department, undertakes the heist. Thus begins A Love Beyond Grievance.

Part memoir, part fiction, the novel unfolds against the backdrop of
political purges in the early 1950s, biracialism, university turbulence,
and Mussolini's mistress.

Paul Levitt earned a Ph.D. in English at UCLA and has taught at the University of Colorado since 1964, spending many summers in London writing plays for the BBC Radio. His great passion is writing historical fiction, which has enabled him to visit the Jazz Age (Chin Music), McCarthyism (Dark Matters), immigrants to America (Come with Me toBabylon), 12th-century England (The Saint-Makers), Soviet Russia (Stalin’s Barber), Nazi Germany (Yana), postwar Berlin (Berlin Revisited), and mid-century American upper-crust society (Rowing to Ithaca). A prolific author, Paul has published 13 novels, 17 plays, 7 children’s books, and numerous academic treatises.