Christopher Benfey on A Summer of Hummingbirds

On December 4, Christopher Benfey received the 2009 Christian Gauss Award for his book A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade (The Penguin Press, 2009). This award, given for books in the field of literary scholarship and criticism, was created in 1950 to honor a former Phi Beta Kappa president and distinguished scholar at Princeton University.

Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke, Benfey has emerged over the past decade as a prolific critic, essayist and author, whose reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement have established him as a distinguished contemporary arbiter of modern and late 20th century American literature.

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• A Summer of Hummingbirds
• Phi Beta Kappa
• Book Awards
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