Michael Wood (born Lincoln, 19 August 1936)[1] is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University.[2] He is a literary and cultural critic, and an author of critical and scholarly books as well as a writer of reviews, review articles, and columns.[3]
Prior to teaching at Princeton, he taught at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, lived briefly in Mexico City, then took the chair of English at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.
Michael George Wood was born in Lincoln, England.[4][5] He obtained his BA in 1957 in French and German from St John's College, Cambridge, and his PhD in 1962, also from Cambridge,[1] for a thesis entitled The Dramatic Function of Symbol in Maeterlinck and Claudel.[4]
Career
From 1964 to 1982 Wood taught at Columbia University, becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and he then took up the Professorship of English Literature at the University of Exeter (1982–95).[4] In 1995 he was appointed Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, which post he held until his retirement in 2013.[4][5]
Personal life
Wood lives in New Jersey with his wife, Elena Uribe, and has three children: Gaby Wood, the Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation,[6] Patrick Wood, CEO of Util,[7] and Tony Wood, former editor at the New Left Review and author of Chechnya: The Case For Independence.[8]
Selected works
Stendhal (Cornell University Press, 1971)
America in the Movies (Basic Books, 1975)
García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the risks of fiction (Chatto and Windus, 1994)
Children of Silence: on contemporary fiction (Columbia University Press, 1998)