Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson (born 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]

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 is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,^[5] and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.^[6]

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]

Publications

Books

• (as editor) W. H. Auden. Collected Poems. Faber & Faber, 1976; 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 (five 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.

Selected essays

• "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.
• "Auden and God". New York Review of Books, 6 December 2007.
• "New York Everyman". New York Review of Books, 12 June 2008.
• "'What We Love, Not Are'" (on Frank O'Hara) New York Review of Books, 25 September 2008.
• "The Perils of His Magic Circle" (on William Maxwell). New York Review of Books, 29 April 2010.
• "The Obedient Bellow". New York Review of Books, 28 April 2011.

References

Further reading

• 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)