Steven Marcus
| Steven Marcus | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 December 1928 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Notable work | The Other Victorians (1966) |
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Main interests
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Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Pornography |
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Notable ideas
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Pornotopia |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Steven P. Marcus is an American academic and literary critic who has published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography. He is currently George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Steven Marcus was born in New York City, the son of Nathan and Adeline Muriel (née Gordon) Marcus. His grandparents were emigrants from the countryside near Vilnius. Adeline and Nathan, both nominally observant Jews, were raised, met, and married in the Bronx, and Nathan attended business school for two years to become an accountant. Only ten months after Steven was born in 1928, the stock market crashed, leaving his father unemployed for six years and causing the family to slide into poverty. Steven’s sister, Debora, was born in 1936, and the family moved to a lower-class neighborhood in the Bronx called Highbridge, near Yankee Stadium, which was populated by Irish, Italian, and Jewish families.
Marcus attended William Howard Taft and De Witt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of fifteen in 1944, against the backdrop of World War II. He was admitted with full scholarships to both Columbia University and Harvard, but because his family could not afford to pay for room and board at Harvard, he attended Columbia, where he studied under Lionel Trilling. Because of his family’s economic precariousness, Marcus continued to live at home and carry his lunch to school in a paper bag. Upon graduation, Marcus immediately enrolled in graduate school at Columbia, writing his master’s thesis on Henry James under the guidance of F. W. Dupee. After taking his master's degree in 1949, he took an instructorship at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he lived on a pig farm. Marcus was then appointed to a two-year lectureship at Baruch College, and became married to his first wife. Marcus also had brief stints at the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California.
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