Introduction
Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
Background
Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana and attended The Putney School. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Career
Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Select publications
- American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South. (University of Michigan Press, 2010).
- The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, (2003). [1]
- Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable (1999).
- A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade