BA, Earlham College, 1964; MA, University of Chicago, 1965; PhD, Queen's University (Canada), 1972. Professor of English, The Pennsylvania State University, 1985-. Books: The Place of Poetry (University Press of Kentucky, 1981); The Moral Imagination (University of Iowa Press, 1986); My Life with President Kennedy (University of Iowa Press, 1994); Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America (Ivan R. Dee, 2000). Many essays, reviews, poems in American Scholar, TLS, Kenyon Review, VQR, Sewanee Review, New Leader, Queen's Quarterly, etc. Major interests: Victorian literature and society; contemporary American society; the American university as a present-day version of the late-medieval Church.

Also In VQR

• Making Sense of America
• Jack-In-The-Pulpit
• Did You Once See Willy Plain?