Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar. He is the author of Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965); Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990); Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); The Norton Shakespeare (1997); Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004); Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).
Alfred David (Ph.D. Harvard) is Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. He is the author of The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry, and editor of the "Romaunt of the Rose" in The Riverside Chaucer and, with George B. Pace, "Chaucer's Minor Poems I" in The Variorum Chaucer. He is the recipient of a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship and Guggenheim and Fulbright Research fellowships and past president of the New Chaucer Society.
Barbara Josephine Kiefer Lewalski was born in Topeka, Kansas on February 22, 1931. She received a bachelor of science degree in education and a master's degree from Kansas State Teachers College and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. She began her academic career as an instructor at Wellesley College and went on to become the first woman to be granted tenured and endowed professorships in the English departments of Brown University and Harvard University. She was a Renaissance scholar and expert on the poet John Milton. She wrote numerous books including Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained; Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms; Writing Women in Jacobean England; and The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1979. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Renaissance Society of America in 2016. She died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018 at the age of 87.
M. H. Abrams, 1912 - 2015 Meyer Howard Abrams was born in Long Branch, New Jersey on July 23, 1912. He received a B.A. in English from Harvard University in 1934. He won a Henry fellowship to Cambridge University in 1935. He returned to Harvard University, where he received a Masters' degree in 1937 and a Ph. D. in 1940. He joined the Cornell University faculty in 1945 and taught a popular introductory survey class. While at Cornell in the 1950s, he was asked by publisher W. W. Norton to lead a team of editors compiling excerpts of vital English works. The first edition of the Norton Anthology came out in 1962. Abrams stayed on through seven editions. He was also the author of a popular Glossary of Literary Terms, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Natural Supernaturalism, The Milk of Paradise, and the essay collection The Fourth Dimension of a Poem. In 2014, he received a National Arts Medal for "expanding our perceptions of the Romantic tradition and broadening the study of literature." He died on April 21, 2015 at the age of 102.
Lawrence Lipking (Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English and Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Life of the Poet. He is also the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England; Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition; and Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author and editor of High Romantic Argument. Lipking is the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, Newberry Library, Wilson International Center for Scholars, and NEH Senior fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
