Mark McGurl

After graduating from Harvard Mark McGurl worked at The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, then earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins. Since arriving at UCLA he has published in journals such as Representations, Critical Inquiry and American Literary History and has held fellowships from Stanford Humanities Center and the Office of the President of the University of California. Published by Princeton University Press in 2001, his first book, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, examines the transformation of the status of the novel beginning in the late-nineteenth century, mapping the upward mobility of the genre to period discourses of social class, mental labor and social space. His second book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, published by Harvard University Press, rereads postwar fiction in light of the rise of the creative writing program. McGurl teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate classes in American literature and related topics.