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Explanation and Analysis:
Dead Poets Society is a fictional bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel. The book, which takes place at the fictitious boarding school Welton in 1959, is also a late 1950s period piece and a boarding school novel. It is not a coincidence that the story is set at the very end of the 1950s (a time period often associated with conformity and adherence to social norms) and right before the 1960s (a time period associated with social change and free thinking). In fact, elements of the plot such as Charlie advocating for Welton to admit women and Todd’s nonviolent resistance against Headmaster Nolan's wishes allude to the push for civil rights which occurred in the 1960s.
Kleinbaum's Dead Poets Society belongs to a tradition of coming-of-age stories which take place entirely or partially in boarding schools, such as A Separate Peace by John Knowles or Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. The book was published in 1989, the same year the movie of the same name was released. In fact, Kleinbaum was commissioned to write the book based on the Dead Poets Society’s screenplay. During the 1980’s, movie studios started investing heavily in tie-in products to their movies, including novelizations like Kleinbaum’s. Kleinbaum herself was commissioned to write novels based on other 1980s movies such as Dirty Dancing and D.A.R.Y.L.
It is worth dwelling on the fact that Kleinbaum wrote the book based on a screenplay: she is responsible for many creative choices, including specific figurative language use, but also adheres rigidly to a plot not of her own creation. An eagle-eyed reader familiar with the movie might notice some differences between the book and the movie. Many of those differences are due to the fact that Kleinbaum used the original screenplay for the book, which included scenes later cut during the production of the film.
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