Richard Gray (literary scholar)

Richard John Gray, FBA (born 1944) is a British literary scholar specialising in American literature. He was professor of literature at the University of Essex from 1990 to 2015. After completing his undergraduate degree and PhD at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Essex in 1969; he remained there for the rest of his career, being promoted to senior lecturer (1976) and reader (1981) before his appointment to a professorship. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1993.

He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of South Carolina and the University of Georgia. In 1987, he received the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; and he has lectured extensively in Europe and the United States. He was Associate Editor and then Editor of the Journal of American Studies from 1990 to 2000. In 2016, he was awarded a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship to support his research into the relationship between writing and trauma in American literature.

Publications

 * The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
 * Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, vol. 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
 * American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Longman, 1990)
 * The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
 * Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2000)
 * A History of American Literature (1st end, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; 2nd edn, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)
 * A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007)
 * After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11, Blackwell Manifestos (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
 * A Brief History of American Literature (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
 * A History of American Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)