| 1 | Name: | Dr. Michael Wood | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2004 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
As the list of his publications suggests, Michael Wood is a critic of astonishing range, working with literature in several languages and from several periods. He has also written screenplays. His books have been enthusiastically reviewed, and many of them have won more than academic readership. He writes and speaks with perspicacity, wit and penetration, and he concerns himself with large issues (the importance of literature; the social and moral meanings of film; the need for knowledge of diverse cultures) as well as small ones (the texture of prose, the function of an image). Also brilliantly successful as a teacher and administrator, Dr. Wood has been the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University since 1995. Born in England, he holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (1961) and has also taught at Columbia and Exeter Universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature, he has authored many books, including Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies, or "Santa Maria, It had Slipped My Mind" (1989); Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1990); The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1995); Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction (1998); and The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003). | |||