Edward Mendelson Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities
My Contact Info
614 Philosophy, Mail Code: 4944, United States
Office Hours Fall 2022
In London for the fall semester, but available for Zoom office hours, usually Wednesday mornings (New York time); please e-mail him to set up a meeting.
B.A., University of Rochester (1966); Ph.D., Johns Hopkins (1969). At Columbia since 1981, Professor Mendelson has also taught?at Yale and Harvard. A recipient of American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships, he is chiefly?interested in 19th-and 20th-century literature, formal and social aspects of poetry and narrative, and biographical criticism. He is?Auden's literary executor; his book?Later Auden?(1999) is a sequel to his?Early Auden?(1981). His book?The Things That Matter:?What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life?was published by Pantheon in 2006. A new book on twentieth-century American writers will be published by New York Review Books in 2013. He has edited a volume of?essays on Thomas Pynchon and, with Michael Seidel,?Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions.?He has?prepared editions of novels by Hardy, Bennett, Meredith, Wells, and Trollope, the first five volumes of a complete edition of?Auden, and selections of Auden's poems and prose. His essays and reviews have appeared in the?New York Review of?Books,London Review of Books,?TLS, the?New York Times Book Review, and many other journals and collections, and he wrote an?introduction for a new edition of?Gravity's Rainbow.?He has also written about computers, music, and the visual arts. He is?a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.