Frank Richard Lentricchia

Literary critic; Novelist; Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature. Leading literary critic and novelist who has taught at Duke for almost three decades. His first two books were about modern poetry, and he then began to write more about literary theory, publishing ground-breaking books in the early 1980s. His first non-scholarly book, The Edge of Night, was followed with his much-noted essay in Lingua Franca, Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic, his farewell to certain types of academic criticism and theory. Though he did not completely abandon literary comment, he then devoted himself to fiction. He produced eight novels of great aesthetic range and interest. A book about him, Frank Lentricchia: Essays on His Works is a collection of essays and reviews that concern his fictional output from Johnny Critelli (1996) to The Book of Ruth (2005).He explored the complexities of ethnic and artistic identity, with great anguish and style. His fiction deserves the attention given his scholarly work.