Mark McGurl

Mark McGurl is an American literary critic specializing in 20th-century American literature. He is currently a Professor of English at Stanford University.

Background

McGurl received his B.A. from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University. He has also worked as a journalist for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2011, McGurl received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.

Publications

Books

• The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. (Harvard University Press, 2009).
• The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Articles and essays

• "Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present,"New Literary History," Fall 2010.
• "A Response to Elif Batuman's Review of The Program Era in the London Review of Books." Official Website: The Program Era Reviews, October 1/October 10, 2010.
• "The Zombie Renaissance," n+1 no.9 spring 2010.
• "Understanding Iowa: Flannery O'Connor B.A., M.F.A." American Literary History, Summer 2007.
• "Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture" Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 2005.
• "The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction." Critical Inquiry, Fall 2005.
• "Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James" Representations 68, Autumn 1999, 59-83.
• "Making 'Literature' of It:Hammett and High Culture." American Literary History, 9.4, Winter 1997, 702-717.
• "Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong." Critical Inquiry, Spring 1996.

• The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing from Harvard University Press
• The Novel Art:Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James from Princeton University Press