Ezra Greenspan

           Ezra Greenspan is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is a literary, media, and social historian specializing in the history and culture of the modern United States. His books include William Wells Brown: An African American LIfe (finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters book prize), George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (winner of the 2001 American Publishers Association Award for Best Scholarly Biography), and Walt Whitman and the American Reader. He is also the founding co-editor of the scholarly journal, Book History (winner of the 1997 Award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Scholarly Journals).

          He is currently at work on a comprehensive family biography to be called Frederick Douglass and His People: A Family Biography, which will offer a history of the generic Bailey/Douglass family from the moment of European/African/Native contact in Maryland through eight generations of enslavement and into the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

• Walt Whitman and the American Reader (1990)
• George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (2000)
• “Song of Myself”: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition (2005)
• William Wells Brown: A Reader (2008)

• Editor: William Wells Brown: Clotel and Other Works (NY: Library of America, 2014)

• Co-editor, vol. 17 of Book History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

Books

• William Wells Brown: A Reader
• George Palmer Putnam
• Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
• Walt Whitman and the American Reader
• William Wells Brown: An African American Life (NY: W. W. Norton, 2014)

• Editor: William Wells Brown: Clotel and Other Works (NY: Library of America, 2014)

Upcoming Readings and Interviews

• Oct. 7: Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill, NC)

• Nov 6: "Black Book Talk," on KBOO FM (Portland, OR) (Listen here)

• Nov 14: NPR-PRI's "The World" (Listen here)

Press

Review of William Wells Brown: An African American Life in New York Times Book Review (Nov. 17, 2014)

William Wells Brown: An African American Life in New York Times Book Review Selected as "Editor's Choice,"- New York Times (Nov. 23, 2014)

Greenspan on Whitman v. Trump

National Endowment for the Humanities commendation

Greenspan recent public lecture: "The Matter of Black Lives: Writing the Biography of Frederick Douglass and His Family"