About the Author
Nina Baym (Ph.D. Harvard) is Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career; Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–1870; Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America; American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860; American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences and most recently, Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927. Some of her essays are collected in Feminism and American Literary History; she has also edited and introduced many reissues of work by earlier American women writers, from Judith Sargent Murray through Kate Chopin. In 2000 she received the MLA’s Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies.
Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford; General Editor and Editor, 1820–1865) is Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville; Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism; The Lives of Frederick Douglas; Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies; and (upcoming from Norton) The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He has edited a number of books, including The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville and Norton Critical Editions of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Pierre. Levine has received fellowships from the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014 the American Literature Section of the MLA awarded him the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.
Wayne Franklin (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh) is Professor and Head of English, University of Connecticut. He is the author of James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (the first volume of his definitive biography, from Yale University Press), The New World of James Fenimore Cooper, and Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. He is the editor of American Voices, American Lives: A Documentary Reader and The Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, A Norton Critical Edition, and co-editor, with Michael Steiner, of Mapping American Culture.
Philip F. Gura (Ph.D. Harvard) is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of many books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance; A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660; Jonathan Edwards, America’s Evangelical; and American Transcendentalism: A History. For ten years he was editor of the journal Early American Literature. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
Jerome Klinkowitz (Ph.D. Wisconsin), is University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author or editor of over forty books in postwar culture and literature, among them, Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction; Kurt Vonnegut’s America; Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction; and The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present.
