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Department of English

Michael Kreyling

Professor Emeritus
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English

Michael Kreyling received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1975. Before coming to Vanderbilt in 1985, he taught at Mississippi State University and Tulane University. At Vanderbilt, he teaches classes in twentieth century American literature; Southern literature; American and Southern studies; and the works of authors such as Faulkner, Welty, and Wright.

He is the author of several books and numerous articles, primarily on Southern literature from the antebellum period up through the twentieth century, in journals such as the Southern Review, Southern Quarterly, and American Literary History.

Representative publications

  • Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981.
  • Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1986.
  • Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.
  • New Essays on Wise Blood. Ed. NY: Cambridge UP, 1994.
  • Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998.
  • Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir and Welty: Complete Novels. Ed. with Richard Ford. NY: The Library of America, 1998.
  • The Novels of Ross Macdonald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
  • The South That Wasn’t There. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2010.
  • A Late Encounter With the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.