English papers

Well-known critic William H. Pritchard reviews his life as a passionate student and teacher of English in the classrooms of New England's Amherst College. Pritchard takes us from the era of the all-male college, where "conduct befitting a gentleman" was the only rule, through the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s, when the teaching of T. S. Eliot had to compete with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ironically, as Pritchard finds his own voice as a critic and teacher, he finds also that his literary and pedagogical aims seem increasingly marginal. The book's later chapters recount the…