James Wood

Class of Fall 2010

Staff Writer, The New Yorker; and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism

Harvard University

The Nearest Thing to Life: The Idea of Character in Fiction

At the Academy, Wood launched a broad investigation of the modern novel’s contentious relationship with God, from about 1850 onward. Questions of selfhood and fictional character – two of Wood’s longstanding interests – were also an important part of this discussion.

James Wood, a noted literary critic, is currently on the staff of the New Yorker and has held the post of Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University since 2003. Wood’s reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books, where he is a member of the editorial board. His most recent book, How Fiction Works, was published in 2008 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He is author of two essay collections on criticism, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library, 2000) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), which was short listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, as well as of the autobiographical novel The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). Wood won the British Press Young Journalist of the Year Award in 1990, the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000, and the National Magazine Award for Criticism by the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2009.