Christopher Benfey | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 28, 1954 (age 72) Merion, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Education | Guilford College (AB) Harvard University (PhD) |
| Occupations | Professor, author, critic |
| Writing career | |
| Subject | Emily Dickinson |
| Notable works | Degas in New Orleans (1997) Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay (2012) |
| Notable awards | Guggenheim Fellow (1988) MacDowell Fellow (1988) |
Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is a Professor Emeritus of English at Mount Holyoke College.
Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania,[citation needed] but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana. and attended The Putney School. His father was a German immigrant and his mother was from North Carolina.
He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father, Otto Theodor Benfey, was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his Bachelor of Arts at Guilford College. Benfey holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He has written multiple works of nonfiction on famous American poets and authors such as Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, and more.
He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and Times Literary Supplement. He was an art critic for Slate.
Benfey's poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares.
His family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, was published by Penguin Press in 2012. Kirkus Reviews called it "a lyrical but unsentimental family memoir, taking in art, memory and time." Adam Goodheart at The New York Times Book Review described the memoir as "a book about earthen vases, epic voyages and ancestral blood. Part memoir, part family saga, part travelogue, part cultural history, it takes readers on a peripatetic ramble across America and beyond."
He is Professor Emeritus of English, formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, at Mount Holyoke College, where he has taught since 1989. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow as well as a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
