Edward Mendelson (born March 15,1946) is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.[1] He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work,including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999).[2] He is also the author of The Things That Matter:What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006),[3] about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels,and Moral Agents:Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden,including Collected Poems (1976;2nd edn. 1990;3rd edn.,2007),The English Auden (1977),Selected Poems (1979,2nd edn.,2007),As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse,1995),and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986–).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon:A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays,including "The Sacred,the Profane,and The Crying of Lot 49" (1975;reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures:Essays on Thomas Pynchon). The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative," further elaborated in a later essay,"Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon".[4]
The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have To Say About the Stages of Life. Pantheon, 2006; with new afterword, Anchor Books, 2007.
Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. New York Review Books, 2015.
Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. Princeton University Press, 2018; revised from two earlier books on Auden.
Essays and reporting
"The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49". Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Literature, ed. Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirby. Duke University Press, 1975; revised version in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (see above),
"Gravity's Encyclopedia". Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Little, Brown, 1976.
"Encyclopedic Narrative, from Dante to Pynchon". MLN, 91 (December 1976).
"The Word & the Web". New York Times Book Review, 2 June 1996.
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