Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College. He is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Gorra is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He has received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Nona Balakian Citation of the National Book Critics Circle for his work as a reviewer.