Amherst Reads About the Author

Name
William H. Pritchard

Current Home
Amherst, MA

Date of Birth
November 12, 1932

Place of Birth
Binghamton, New York

Education
B.A.     Amherst College, 1953
              Columbia University, 1953-54 (Philosophy)
M.A.    Harvard University, 1956 (English)
Ph.D.   Harvard University, 1960 (English)
              Title of Dissertation: "The Uses of Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry"

Academic and Professional Distinctions

• Phi Beta Kappa, 1953
• A.C.L.S. (Junior Fellowship), 1963-64; (Fellowship), 1977-78
• Guggenheim Foundation, 1973-74
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1977-78, 1986
• Script Writer for "Robert Frost: A Question of Place" (National Public Radio program, 1978)
• Member of the Editorial Board of Hudson Review
• Sponsoring Member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
• Under Criticism: Essays For William H. Pritchard, ed. David Sofield and Herbert F. Tucker (Ohio University Press, 1998)
• Member American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2004

Books

• Wyndham Lewis (Twayne, 1968)
• Wyndham Lewis: Profile in Literature (Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1972)
• Editor: W.B. Yeats (Penguin Critical Anthologies Series, 1972)
• Seeing Through Everything: English Writers 1918-1940 (Faber and Faber/Oxford, 1977)
• Editor: "Contemporary Prose, 1945" section of Norton Anthology of American Literature (First Edition-1979, Second Edition-1985, Third Edition-1989, Fourth Edition-1994)
• Lives of the Modern Poets (Faber and Faber/Oxford, 1980; Second Edition with new preface, University Press of New England, 1996)
• Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford, 1984; Second Edition with new preface, University of Massachusetts Press, 1993)
• Editor: A Boy's Will and North of Boston by Robert Frost (Signet/NAL, 1990)
• Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990)
• Editor: Selected Poems of Randall Jarrell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990)
• Playing It By Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994)
• English Papers: A Teaching Life (Graywolf Press, 1995)
• Talking Back to Emily Dickinson, and Other Essays (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)
• Editor: The Most of it: Essays on Language and the Imagination, by Theodore Baird.  (Amherst College Press, 1999)
• Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Steerforth Press, 2000); Paperbook edition with new preface, (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
• Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
• Editor: English at Amherst, by Theodore Baird, (Amherst College Press, 2005).
• On Poets and Poetry (Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, 2009).

Essays and Reviews
for Hudson Review, Boston Globe and others

Teaching at Amherst
I alternate (every three years or so) a number of courses in English and American writers.  Major English Writers (17^th/18^th century), Major English Writers (19^th century), British Writers 1900-1940, British and American Poetry 1900-1950, American Fiction 1950-2000, and Literary Criticism.  Also I teach, every fall semester, an introductory course in close reading, Novels, Plays, Poems.