M. H. Abrams
| M. H. Abrams | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Meyer Howard Abrams July 23, 1912 Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | April 21, 2015 (aged 102) Ithaca, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Mike Abrams |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Literary critic |
| Known for | The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Mirror and the Lamp |
Meyer Howard "Mike" Abrams (July 23, 1912 – April 21, 2015), usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams's editorship, The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.
Abrams was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Long Branch, New Jersey. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession..., so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his tutor was I. A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received a master's degree in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1940.
During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. The literary critics Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and E. D. Hirsch, and the novelists William H. Gass and Thomas Pynchon were among his students. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. As of March 4, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.
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