Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar. He is the author of Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965); Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990); Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); The Norton Shakespeare (1997); Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004); Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).
Meyer Howard Abrams was born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1912. He studied English at Harvard University and attained his B.A. in 1934. He won a Henry fellowship to Cambridge University in 1935, where he was tutored by I. A. Richards. Abrams returned to Harvard for graduate school, and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. Abrams set the standard of critical authority for American literary studies for the quarter century after World War II. He is the author of two syntheses of English Romantic thought, and has also been general and Romantic period editor of the most widely used college anthology of English literature; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, as well… as author of a popular Glossary of Literary Terms, and several influential essays on English Romanticism. Abrams's dissertation written in 1940, was expanded and published in 1953 as The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. The Mirror and the Lamp contributed to the legitimation of English Romanticism as a field of study. Nearly 20 years later, in Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams asserted a different thesis with similar authority.
Jon Stallworthy was born on January 18, 1935 in London, England. He served as second lieutenant in the Nigeria Regiment of the West African Frontier Force in the mid-1950s. After completing his national service, he studied English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem The Earthly Paradise in 1958. His first collection of poetry, The Astronomy of Love, was published in 1961. His other collections of poetry include Root and Branch, Hand in Hand, A Familiar Tree, The Anzac Sonata, The Guest from the Future, Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems, Body Language, and War Poet. He received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award in 2010 in recognition… of his sustained body of work as a poet. He also wrote an autobiography entitled Singing School: The Making of a Poet. He wrote biographies about several poets including Wilfred Owen, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok, Herbert Read, and Geoffrey Dearmer. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literature Prize. He edited several collections of poetry including The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, The Oxford Book of War Poetry, and Complete Poems and Fragments. He also taught English literature at Cornell University and Wolfson College, Oxford University. He died on November 19, 2014 at the age of 79.