Richard Locke

Richard Locke is a critic and essayist, the author of more than 180 essays and reviews that have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, BookForum, Salmagundi, The Yale Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and other publications. His book Critical Children: The Use of Children in Ten Great Novels will be published in September 2011.

He has taught writing, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University since 1984 and is currently Professor of Writing and Director of Nonfiction in the Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts. He received a B.A. at Columbia, a B.A. at Clare College, Cambridge University, and did postgraduate study at Harvard University. He is a recipient of the Great Teacher Award of the School of the Arts Alumni Association and a former chair of the Writing Program.


He has also been a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, a lecturer at the English Institute, Harvard University, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University. He has served as a judge of The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize Jury in Criticism, and as a director and president of The National Book Critics Circle.