Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is one of America's foremost literary scholars and critics, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Born in 1943 in Boston, he received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Yale. He is widely credited as a founder of New Historicism, a critical approach that situates literary texts within their historical and cultural contexts. His book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) narrated the rediscovery of Lucretius's ancient poem De rerum natura by Renaissance book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, arguing that this discovery helped spark the Renaissance and modernity. It won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011. Greenblatt is also the author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), and many other landmark works of criticism. He is the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare and has been a preeminent popularizer of Shakespeare scholarship.