Although I think of myself as a New Englander, I was actually born in San Francisco and spent several years during World War II in New Orleans, where my father, a doctor in the US Public Health Service, was stationed. After the war, he moved to Middletown, Connecticut, my mother's ancestral home, where he set up a private practice. I graduated from Haverford College as an English major, and did my graduate work in English at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving my Ph.D. in 1964. During my graduate years, I married and had four children, now all adults with children of their own. While I was writing my doctoral dissertation, on Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa, I taught at Catholic University in Washington and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
In 1965 I moved to Boston as one of the founding faculty of the new Boston campus. Over the years, I have chaired a number of governance organizations and committees. I served for three years as an Associate Dean and one year as Acting Dean. I chaired the English department for four years, and served for three years as the faculty's representative to the Board of Trustees. I organized the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Boston. I retired as full-time Professor in May 2002 but have returned occasionally since to teach courses.
In 1969 I began to publish a series of articles on the eighteenth-century novel, especially the novels of Fielding, on eighteenth-century periodicals, and on satire. In 1994 I published a long annotated bibliography of scholarship on the eighteenth-century authors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. My extensive study of satire (The Literature of Satire) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. Although I do not consider myself a theorist, I try to look at the theoretical implications of the texts and topics I discuss.
My teaching followed the topics of my research: eighteenth-century studies, the novel, and satire. In addition I developed and taught English 300 (Literary Studies II: Literature and Power). I regularly taught English 201 (Five British Writers) and Core 120 (The Rushdie Controversy). I occasionally taught English C204 (The Nature of Literature: Fiction) and Freshman Composition. All of my literature courses concentrated on reading accurately, on seeing the possibilities of a variety of meanings in a given text, on understanding literary works as the product of their culture as well as their immediate authors. Depending on the course, students wrote three-to-five papers, totaling fifteen-to-twenty pages, and I usually gave a final examination. I like to ask questions, and I particularly enjoy classes in which students ask a lot of questions as well.