Product Code Database
Arnold Rampersad (born 13 November 1941) is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965.Edward Guthman, "ISOLATED MAN / Arnold Rampersad's biography examines how foibles and fame became powerful hurdles in the literary life of Ralph Ellison", SF Gate, 19 June 2007. The second volume (1989) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Rampersad is currently Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004 to August 2006.
Rampersad moved to the US in 1965. He graduated from Bowling Green State University with a bachelor's degree and master's degree in English (1967 and 1968). "Stanford Professor a Visiting Scholar at BGSU", BGSU, 9 September 2005. In 1973, he earned a Ph.D from Harvard University, his dissertation being subsequently published as the intellectual biography The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois.
He was a member of the Stanford University English Department from 1974 to 1983, before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since then he taught there and at Columbia and Princeton, before returning to Stanford in 1998.
Rampersad's teaching covers such areas as 19th- and 20th-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance.
His published books include biographical works on W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Ellison, as well as edited volumes of writings by Richard Wright.
In 2007, his biography of Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), on which he had worked for eight years, was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.Jennifer Gonnerman, "2007 National Book Award Nonfiction Finalist Interview With Arnold Rampersad" , National Book Foundation.
In 2010, Rampersad was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and in 2012 was the recipient of the BIO Award from Biographers International Organization. Also in 2012, he won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.Tara Jefferson, "Biographer Arnold Rampersad Is The 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Winner", Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, 11 July 2012.
|
|
