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Christopher Benfey

Biography

Christopher Benfey

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Benfey has written four books about the American Gilded Age, including A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Christopher Benfey

Books by Christopher Benfey

If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years
by Christopher Benfey - Biography, History, Nonfiction

At the turn of the 20th century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature, but the entire literary world. At the height of his fame in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner. His influence on figures --- including the likes of Freud and William James --- was vast and profound. But in recent decades, Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes and professors, he himself is treated with profound unease as a man on the wrong side of history. In IF, scholar Christopher Benfey brings this fascinating writer to life and gives full attention to his intense engagement with the United States.