The academic life of John Bellairs was nearing an end by the mid-1960s. Coming back to Illinois after a two-year stint in Minnesota, Bellairs projected completing his degree in less than a year, by August 1966. With his classes now complete, he most likely spent the 1965-66 school year working on the dreaded dissertation, feeling the need to come back to Chicago full time to try to get over the dissertation hump. At the very least he probably was required to register as a student so that he could use the library in Chicago since the one in Winona, as one would expect, would not have had the resources he needed for his kind of project.
We believe Bellairs moved to an apartment on Bellevue Avenue, on the north side of Chicago and near the Newberry Library where friend Don Wilcox was doing research at the time. It's unknown if he and John were roommates or at least lived near each other.
John's dissertation project was titled A Critical Edition of The Tragedy of Nero (1624) - in other words, a study of a very minor and an anonymously written dramatic work of the Elizabethan period. The play's obscurity, coupled with a possible persistence on the subject by Bellairs' advisor, may have been a large factor in Bellairs' unwilling to complete of the project, Gerald Kadish feels; it is unknown whether Bellairs chose the topic himself or had it chosen for him. Myers recalls that Bellairs once made the comment of how Frank O'Malley said a doctoral thesis in English consisted of "finding some obscure eighteenth century English author and blowing him up all out of proportion."
"There might have been something about the play that made it an attractive subject from John's point of view," notes Bowen, though he doubts the title character was the deciding factor. "Knowing John, I suspect it was more likely a superabundance of silly lines."
Whatever John's interpretation of the source text was, or however much he completed, is now lost. Priscilla Bellairs says that once he received the letter accepting St. Fidgeta for publication, "he burned the microfilm of The Play of Nero he was working on and never looked back." Bellairs ultimately decided the dissertation, and the doctoral requirements on the whole, were not as important as they were a year or two before. He considered himself at this point the "famous author," what with Fidgeta to be published as a book that June, and made it official: he wanted to write.
Interestingly, some of historical characters from this play were later transferred to his fiction (most notably Melichus, but also Sporus).
At one-point in the mid-seventies, Myers asked Bellairs why he never went the last mile to complete the work. It was a long story, Bellairs said, beginning with the sudden death of his mentor at Chicago. "I can't really describe the actual rate at which John grew tired of academia, but I think it's something we all face if we stay in school. At one point you just get sick of being a student all your life. He was sick of teaching and by that time in his life he knew he was never going to return to it."
The spring quarter of 1966 was his last as a student in Chicago; however he still needed to work and certainly had heard by this time about tiny Shimer College in northwest Illinois, no doubt from his friend Bernard Markwell who was now on staff there and probably responsible for persuading Bellairs to join him. Bellairs, too, expressed an interest in joining the faculty of a campus that certainly seemed more engaging - in his eyes - than St. Teresa's had been.
