Edward Mendelson is a professor of English Literature at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and is the author of the biographies of Early Auden and Later Auden. He has written essays on and prepared editions of George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. He lives in New York City.