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).
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]
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 reportingedit
"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 reviewsedit
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.
Referencesedit
^ ab"The Geography of His House". Archived from the original on 2011-05-17.
^Mendelson, Edward (2006). The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 0-375-42408-3.
^Jed Rasula (1999). "Textual Indigence in the Archive". Postmodern Culture. 9 (3). doi:10.1353/pmc.1999.0022. S2CID 144232562.
^"Newly Elected - April 2017 | American Philosophical Society". Sep 15, 2017. Archived from the original on September 15, 2017. Retrieved Sep 22, 2019.
^"Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature". Archived from the original on 2015-04-27. Retrieved 2009-01-25.
^"Isabel Dalhousie Fellowship". Archived from the original on 2012-11-29.
Further readingedit
Contemporary Authors (Gale Research), vol. 65–68
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series (Gale Research), vols. 11, 87
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, ed. by Jenny Stringer (1996)