Michael Gorra

Michael Gorra received his A.B. from Amherst and his Ph.D. from Stanford, and has spent his career at Smith College, where he is now the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English. He teaches and writes about the history of the novel, from Jane Austen to the present, with a focus on the shape of individual careers.

His most recent books are The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including a Public Scholar Award, and the Nona Balakian Citation from the National Book Critics Circle award for his work as a reviewer. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and among other publications, and has been a judge for the National Book Award in fiction.

Gorra’s earlier books are The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990). As editor he has put together volumes of stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James for Penguin, along with the Norton Critical Editions of James’ Portrait of a Lady, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. He has edited Elizabeth Spencer, Novels and Stories, for the Library of America.