Michael Wood

Michael George Wood (born Lincoln, 19 August 1936) is a British and American professor emeritus of English at Princeton University. He is a literary and cultural critic, and an author of critical and scholarly books, and a writer of reviews, review articles, and columns.

Before joining Princeton, Wood taught at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature and chaired the English department at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.

Early life and education Michael George Wood was born in Lincoln, England on 19 August 1936. He obtained his BA in 1957 in French and German from St John's College, Cambridge and his PhD in 1962, also from Cambridge, Patrick Wood, CEO of Util, and Tony Wood, former editor at the New Left Review and author of Chechnya: The Case For Independence. He lived briefly in Mexico City.

Selected works Stendhal (Cornell University Press, 1971) America in the Movies (Basic Books, 1975) García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge University Press, 1990) The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the risks of fiction (Chatto and Windus, 1994) Children of Silence: on contemporary fiction (Columbia University Press, 1998) Belle de Jour (British Film Institute Publishing, 2001) The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003) Franz Kafka (Northcote House/British Council, 2004) Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, editor with Sandra Bermann (Princeton University Press, 2005) Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Yeats and Violence (Oxford University Press, 2010) Film: A very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) On Empson (Princeton University Press, 2017)