Novelist Joyce Carol has taken up the Ivy League society as a topic for her new novel "The Accursed".

Novelist Joyce Carol's latest novel "The Accursed" was released this week. The novel is set in Princeton, New Jersey, where the National Book Award winner has worked as a professor at the Ivy League university since 1978, telling the tale of a curse upon the town's elite families during 1905-1906.

The book features President Woodrow Wilson and author-activist Upton Sinclair among its cast of characters and the author clarifies that it is merely a work of fiction. The author began writing the book in 1984 but stopped midway when she felt the structure of the story was not quite right. However, she began work on the book recently when she developed a satisfying structure for the story.

"I had a project that was very challenging and fascinating, but I never quite felt that the voice was right," Oates told Reuters. "It was too 19th century, so I put it aside and worked on other projects, but every three or four or five years I would take it out and start examining it again."

"The Accursed" focuses on the aristocratic Slade family and is a written perspective of a fictional amateur historian.

According to the author, although ghosts and vampires haunt the upper-class characters, they mirror social demons of the age.

"Things that are repressed are emerging in this lily white affluent society," she said. "What you call the supernatural could be deconstructed as being the return or the revenge of the repressed. Basically everyone was like that. It was unexamined," she said. "So the novel is really about the unexamined bigotry and the failure of this ruling class ... there's a kind of blindness to terrible social injustice."

The author concludes by saying she sees today's generation as people who are looking to bring about a change in society. She says she has faith in the younger generations to sort of shake off the shackles of the past, and what may seem important for an older generation may not be as important for the newer generation.