Paul Brians

After earning his Ph.D. in comparative literature at Indiana University, Paul Brians worked for forty years as an English professor at Washington State University in Pullman. He taught, researched, and wrote about a wide variety of topics, including Medieval and modern European literature, science fiction, nuclear war fiction, the history of ideas, world civilizations before 1500, and South Asian fiction in English (works by authors from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). His Web site contains widely used study guides for various literary works, his photographs of various famous sites in the world, and the complete text of a revised second edition of his book "Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction." In 1997 he began the on-line project "Common Errors in English Usage," which has attracted millions of users since and is continuously updated and revised. Two editions of a book by the same title have been published by William, James & Co., based on the Web site and supplemented with cartoons by Tom Sumner. From 2006 to 2010 the same publisher brought out a boxed daily calendar featuring a usage note on each page. He is now retired to Bainbridge Island but continues to work on the "Common Errors" project and travels frequently to give public lectures on this and other subjects. His photographs of Bainbridge Island will soon be published in a book titled "Four Seasons on Bainbridge Island."