Edward Mendelson Explained

Edward Mendelson
Birth Date:	15 March 1946
Birth Place:	New York City, U.S.
Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities
Spouse:	Cheryl Mendelson
Discipline:	English and Comparative Literature
Education:	University of Rochester (BA) Johns Hopkins University (PhD)
Workplaces:	Columbia University Yale University Harvard University

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]

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 was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.^[5] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,^[6] and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.^[7]

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]

He is married to the writer Cheryl Mendelson.

Bibliography

Books

• Book: Auden, W. H. . Mendelson, Edward . Collected poems . London . Faber & Faber . 1976 .
  • Other editions: 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 (eight 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.
• Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. Princeton University Press, 2018; revised from two earlier books on Auden.

Essays and reporting

• "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.

Book reviews

Year	class='unsortable'	Review article	class='unsortable'	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.	Book: Hutchinson, George . Facing the abyss : American literature and culture in the 1940s . New York . Columbia UP . .

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)

Notes and References

1. Web site: The Geography of His House. https://web.archive.org/web/20110517162708/https://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_07/jones.html. 2011-05-17.
2. Book: Davenport-Hines , Richard . Auden . Richard Davenport-Hines . Heinemann . London . 1995 . 0-434-17507-2.
3. Book: Mendelson , Edward . The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life . Pantheon . New York . 2006 . 0-375-42408-3 . registration .
4. Textual Indigence in the Archive. Jed Rasula. Postmodern Culture. 1999. 9. 3. 10.1353/pmc.1999.0022. 144232562.
5. Web site: Newly Elected - April 2017 | American Philosophical Society. https://web.archive.org/web/20170915195158/https://amphilsoc.org/members/electedApril2017. dead. September 15, 2017. Sep 15, 2017. Sep 22, 2019.
6. Web site: Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature. 2009-01-25. 2015-04-27. https://web.archive.org/web/20150427063707/http://www.rslit.org/index.php?n=Society.Fellows. dead.
7. Web site: Isabel Dalhousie Fellowship . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20121129125054/http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/isabel.dalhousie.html . 2012-11-29.