A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, although in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Elaine Showalter discusses C. P. Snow's The Masters, of the previous year, and several earlier novels have an academic setting and the same characteristics, such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House of 1925, Régis Messac's Smith Conundrum first published between 1928 and 1931 and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night of 1935 (see below).