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Edward Mendelson (born March 15, 1946) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.[1] He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999).[2] He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006),[3] about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
Edward Mendelson | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 15, 1946 New York City, U.S. |
| Title | Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities |
| Spouse | Cheryl Mendelson |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Rochester (BA) Johns Hopkins University (PhD) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | English and Comparative Literature |
| Institutions | Columbia University Yale University Harvard University |
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden, including Collected Poems (1976; 2nd edn. 1990; 3rd edn., 2007), The English Auden (1977), Selected Poems (1979, 2nd edn., 2007), As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse, 1995), and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986– ).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon). The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative," further elaborated in a later essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon".[4]
He is the editor of annotated editions of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Anthony Trollope. With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht; The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977).
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.[5] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,[6] and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.[7]
Before teaching at Columbia, he was an associate professor of English at Yale University and a visiting associate professor of English at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1966) and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (1969).
Since 1986 he has written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.[1]
He is married to the writer Cheryl Mendelson.
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Books
- Auden, W. H. (1976). Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Collected poems. London: Faber & Faber.
- Other editions: Random House, 1976. Revised edition: Vintage Books, 1991 ; Faber & Faber, 1991. Further revised edition: Modern Library, 2007; Faber & Faber 2007.
- (as co-editor) Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions. Yale University Press, 1977. In collaboration with Michael Seidel.
- (as editor) Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-Hall, 1978.
- (as editor) W. H. Auden. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Faber & Faber, 1977; Random House, 1978.
- (as editor) W. H. Auden. Selected Poems: New Edition. Vintage Books, 1978; Faber & Faber, 1978; expanded edition: Vintage Books, 2007.
- Early Auden. Viking, 1981; Faber & Faber, 1981; revised paperback edition: Harvard University Press, 1983; Faber & Faber, 1999; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
- (as editor) The Complete Works of W. H. Auden (eight vols). Princeton University Press, 1986– ; Faber & Faber, 1986– .
- Later Auden. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999; Faber & Faber, 1999; revised paperback edition: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
- The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have To Say About the Stages of Life. Pantheon, 2006; with new afterword, Anchor Books, 2007.
- Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. New York Review Books, 2015.
- Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. Princeton University Press, 2018; revised from two earlier books on Auden.
Essays and reporting
- "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49". Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Literature, ed. Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirby. Duke University Press, 1975; revised version in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (see above),
- "Gravity's Encyclopedia". Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Little, Brown, 1976.
- "Encyclopedic Narrative, from Dante to Pynchon". MLN, 91 (December 1976).
- "The Word & the Web". New York Times Book Review, 2 June 1996.
- "Clarissa Dalloway Remembers Cymbeline", Lincoln Center Theater Review, Fall 2007, archived from the original on 2008-06-12
- Mendelson, Edward (6 December 2007), "Auden and God", New York Review of Books
- Mendelson, Edward (12 June 2008), "New York Everyman", New York Review of Books
- Mendelson, Edward (25 September 2008), "What We Love, Not Are", New York Review of Books
- Mendelson, Edward (29 April 2010), "The Perils of His Magic Circle", New York Review of Books
- Mendelson, Edward (28 April 2011), "The Obedient Bellow", New York Review of Books
Book reviews
| Year | Review article | Work(s) reviewed |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Mendelson, Edward (March 7–20, 2019). "Reading in an age of catastrophe". The New York Review of Books. 66 (4): 26–28. | Hutchinson, George. Facing the abyss : American literature and culture in the 1940s. New York: Columbia UP. |
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