Jay Cantor, B.A., Ph.D. (born 1948 New York City) is an American novelist, and essayist.[1]
He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University.[2] He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.[3]
His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson.[4] He was on the The 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.[5]
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To call Jay Cantor the thinking man's Tom Wolfe is a little unfair to Tom Wolfe, who surely believes, and with some justification, that he's the thinking man's Tom Wolfe. It's also a little unfair to Jay Cantor, who for all I know abhors Wolfe's politics and his fiction as well. Yet the scope of Cantor's ambition in his teeming new novel, Great Neck; his avid desire to capture the American scene entire; his crowd of characters, each absorbed in a private drama; certain thrillingly compact episodes that stand out like a prodigy among dull schoolkids; the hankering after abandoned tradition (Cantor is fascinated by the cabala, Wolfe by the Stoics); the stern morality operating just below the surface of the narrative -- all these things, it seems to me, link these two writers, both of whom ardently believe in the power of fiction to bring an American moment to life.[7]