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Distinguished critic of British and American literature, broadly committed to the humanities. World expert on the life and works of W. H. Auden: editor of numerous editions of his poems and other writings, including five volumes of the ongoing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986--). Author of major biography: Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). Also well known for early criticism of Thomas Pynchon. Recent works are addressed to a wide readership and include The Things that Matter (2007), on novels and the stages of life, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, rewritten and expanded from a series of essays in the New York Review of Books.