Shelley Fisher Fishkin received her B.A. from Yale College. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. Since 2003 she has been a professor at the English Department of Stanford University. She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas. Much of her work is focused on Mark Twain but she has also published works on writers such as Frederick Douglass and Theodore Dreiser. Her research… interests have lead her to focus on the influence of African American voices on American literature. Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles and reviews. Her book Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Choice in 1993.
A professor of English literature and American studies who has published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of moral responsibility. The targets of Bradbury's satires include intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness. His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975).… This last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and Cuts (1987).
J. R. LeMaster is Emeritas Professor of English at Baylor University.James D. Wilson teaches at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.