A graduate of Hamilton College, he obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Cornell University, where he was a Martin Sampson Fellow in English. He has published essays and reviews in The New Leader and The Nation, and has recently contributed an essay on George Eliot to the Norton Critical Edition of Middlemarch. With the assistance of a grant from Colby College, he traveled in Ireland and England, where he interviewed Elizabeth Bowen in 1971.