Richard Gray is Professor of Literature at the Universityof Essex and former Distinguished Visiting Professor at a number ofuniversities in the United States. He is the first specialistin American literature to be elected a Fellow of the BritishAcademy and has published over a dozen books on the topic,including the award-winning Writing the South: Ideas of anAmerican Region (1986) and The Life of WilliamFaulkner: A Critical Biography (1994). His History ofAmerican Literature (Blackwell, 2004) is widely considered tobe one of the standard works on the subject.
