Andrew Delbanco has taught at Columbia University since 1985 and holds its Alexander Hamilton chair in American Studies. All three of his degrees are from Harvard. He also runs the Teagle Foundation, which funds liberal education, and in 2001 Time magazine named him America's best social critic.
His subject is the American tradition, read across long stretches of time. The Puritan Ordeal (1989) won Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award. The Death of Satan, Required Reading and The Real American Dream followed in the 1990s, each named a notable book by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. He also writes essays for The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, and he moves easily between literary criticism, religious history and arguments about public life.
Two books stand out among the later ones. Melville: His World and Work (Knopf, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012, revised in 2023) makes the case for undergraduate education. The War Before the War takes up fugitive slaves and the fight over them from the Revolution to the Civil War. Barack Obama presented him with a National Humanities Medal, and in 2022 he gave the Jefferson Lecture on the question of reparations.
On WebToTell he appears as the introducer of the Penguin Classics Moby-Dick, with notes by Tom Quirk, so he is a guide to the novel here rather than its author. Read his introduction first if Melville's whale intimidates you. Then pick up Melville: His World and Work to see the man and the America behind the book.
