Mark McGurl is Professor of English at Stanford University, where his scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics. He is Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel, and also works with the Stanford Literary Lab.

McGurl is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011. Links to reviews, interviews and other articles related to this book have been gathered here. McGurl’s previous book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History.

McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He earned his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins, and until 2011 taught at UCLA.

He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center, and been a Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.