Gordon Norton Ray

Gordon Norton Ray (8 September 1915, New York City – 15 December 1986, Manhattan) was an American author, professor of English, and collector of English and French illustrated books and autographed letters from the Victorian era.

Biography Ray graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka in 1932, Indiana University with A.B. and A.M. in 1936, and graduated and from Harvard University with A.M. in 1938 and Ph.D. in 1940. His doctoral thesis on Thackeray has the title Thackeray in France.

At the University of Illinois, he was a professor of English from 1946 to 1957, also serving as head of the English department, and vice president and provost from 1957 to 1960.

Ray was a professor of English at New York University from 1962 to 1980, when he retired as professor emeritus.

In 1945 and 1946 Harvard University Press published his 4-volume work The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Thackeray's heirs released to Ray additional materials (previously unavailable), enabling him to publish two more biographies, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846 (1955) and Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863 (1957). and The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914 (exhibited in 1982). At the Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus, his collections formed one of the main sources of a Benjamin Disraeli exhibition in 1981.

Upon his death, he had no immediate surviving family members.