Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner, a 2008 Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and a Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist. In October 2009, The Book of Getting Even appeared as El Libro de la Venganza in Spain, where it was named a best book of the year by El Pais. In November 2010, Viking Press released Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Taylor. Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a travel memoir from Marian Wood Books, was released in hardcover in May 2012 and named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker. Taylor is a graduate of Haverford College and Columbia University where he earned the doctorate in English and comparative literature. He has contributed to many publications including Harper’s, Bookforum, BOMB, Esquire, The New Leader, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Raritan. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, he has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012. In September of 2015  Taylor will publish Proust: The Future’s Secret, a biography for the Yale Jewish Lives series. His edition of the collected essays of Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, is due from Viking in  March of 2015.