Edward Mendelson

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Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

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). He is also the author of a book about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006).

Among the volumes by W. H. Auden that he has edited are Auden's 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 Encylopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. by David Leverenz and George Levine, 1976). The latter essay established the widely-used critical category of "encyclopedic narrative, which he further described in another essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon" (MLN, vol. 91, 1976).

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 is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Since 1986 he has also written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.

[edit] References

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)