Born in 1940, Morris Dickstein grew up in New York. He received his education at Columbia, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cambridge, and Yale, where he worked with distinguished critics such as Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, and Harold Bloom. Returning to New York, he taught first at Columbia, closely observing the 1968 student uprising, and then at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre and senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities, which he founded in 1993.
Dickstein’s interests have ranged from English Romantic poetry to the history of criticism, from American cultural history to modern and contemporary fiction. He began teaching film courses in 1975 and writing about film in the late 1970s for publications like American Film, Bennington Review, Partisan Review, and Dissent. His connection to the tumultuous world of the New York intellectuals began with a book review for Partisan Review in 1962, when he was a year out of college. He was a member of the editorial board from 1972 until it ceased publication in 2003. A longstanding contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement, he has also written for The American Scholar, Bookforum, The Nation, and many other publications, combining a career as a teacher and scholar with the activities of a public intellectual.
Send questions, comments and corrections to info@creativewritingmfa.info.
Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.