Robert Paul Lamb

Bob Lamb grew up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and has also lived in Hartford, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in The History of American Civilization from Harvard University and has been a professor at Purdue University since 1991, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth-century American literature and modern American fiction. He has served on 74 doctoral dissertation committees (23 as chair) and 41 MFA/MA committees (9 as chair) since arriving at Purdue. Seventeen of these dissertations, eight of which he chaired, have since been published as books. Bob has authored a two-volume study of Hemingway: "Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story" (Louisiana State University Press 2010) and "The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers (Louisiana State University Press 2013), both of which received Choice's highest rating of "Essential for all readers"; a full-issue monograph entitled "James G. Birney and the Road to Abolitionism" (Alabama Review 1994); and twenty-three articles on Melville, Whitman, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, naturalism, Hemingway, Hurston, Langston Hughes, literary theory, pedagogy, and film. He is also co-editor, with G. R. Thompson, of "A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914" (Blackwell 2005, xvii + 622 pp.), a groundbreaking collection of twenty-nine new essays divided into three sections - historical traditions and genres, cultural contexts and themes, and major authors - to which he contributed the essay on Mark Twain. Bob's current projects are two books, tentatively titled "Mark Twain, Jim Watson, and Race: Reading Huckleberry Finn in the Twenty-First Century" and "Fettered Eagle: A Political Biography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens." A recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Graduate Prize for Dissertations in the English Language, he has received nearly 60 teaching awards from Harvard and Purdue. In 2008, he was named the Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. Bob lives with two former stray kitties, Lizzy, an intense, very gifted tortoise-shell hellion, and Simone, a classy, philosophically reserved but playful seal-point Siamese. The three of them enjoy bird watching, ping pong ball soccer, hide-and-go seek, watching Pittsburg Steelers and New York Giants games on tv, grooming each other, and listening to blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll (especially Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young).