Cynthia Griffin Wolff

Cynthia Griffin Wolff (née Griffin; August 20, 1936 – July 25, 2024) was an American literary historian and editor known for her biographies of Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson. She was the Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography Cynthia Griffin Wolff was born on August 20, 1936, in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the daughter of Eunice ( Heyn) and Sears executive James T. Griffin. She studied at Hathaway Brown School and Radcliffe College (where she obtained a BA in 1958). (Sources differ over the year of her PhD.) Although both her International Who's Who of Authors and Writers and Penguin Random House biographies date it to 1965, While working at UM Amherst, she published two books: Samuel Richardson (1972) and A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977).

In 1980, Wolff moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities in 1985. In 1986, Wolff published Emily Dickinson, a biography of Emily Dickinson. Wolff retired in 2003. During her later life, she lived in a Cape Cod house in South Dennis, Massachusetts, and later in Orchard Cove, a senior community in Canton, Massachusetts.