Arnold Krupat

Arnold Krupat (born 1941) is an American academic who is a retired emeritus professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. His academic work focuses on Native American literature and is informed by critical theory.

Youth and education

Krupat was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York and grew up in the Jacob Riis Housing Projects on the lower east side of Manhattan. He went to public grade school and then to Stuyvesant High School, from which he graduated in 1958.

He attended New York University's Washington Square College of Arts and Science on scholarship, earning his bachelor's degree summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1962. From 1962 to 1963, he spent a year at the Universite de Strasbourg on a Fulbright Fellowship. After returning to New York, he entered graduate school at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship. He received his Ph.D from Columbia with honors in 1967.

Academic career

From 1965 to 1968, Krupat taught in the English Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He started teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York in 1968, and retired, with emeritate, in 2012.

While teaching at Sarah Lawrence, Krupat developed an interest in critical theory and Native American literature. His first book, For Those Who Come After: a Study of Native American Autobiography, was published in 1985. In that book, he championed "a new approach to Native American texts in general, and although he calls his approach a literary one, his view of literature is one fully informed by recent critical theory," according to one reviewer.

In 1989, he published a novel, Woodsmen, or Thoreau & the Indians, and in 2012 What-to-do? a novel. He has also authored, edited, or co-edited 12 more books. His most recent publications are Changed Forever: American Indian Boarding-School Literature, volume 1 published in 2018, and volume 2, 2020. Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak is forthcoming in 2021.

He is also the author of Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature; The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon; and Red Matters. In 2007, he wrote All That Remains: Native Studies. He was the editor of a number of anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism.

In 2001, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, with Brian Swann. The work was honored with the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose.

Krupat has been the editor for Native American literature for the Norton Anthology of American Literature from its 5th to its 8th edition.

Fellowships

Krupat is a recipient of six fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Sarah Lawrence Excellence in Teaching Award.

• 1962: Fulbright Fellowship
• 1963: Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship
• 2005: Guggenheim Fellowship

Published works

• For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography, University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-520-06606-9
• The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-520-06669-4
• Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature, University of California Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0-520-07666-2
• Woodsmen, or Thoreau and the Indians, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-8061-2671-5
• The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, Bison Books, 1998. ISBN 0-8032-7786-5
• Red Matters: Native American Studies (Rethinking the Americas), University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-8122-1803-9
• Norton Anthology of American Literature (editor, with Nima Baym, Wayne Franklin, Philip F. Gura and Robert S. Levine), New York: Norton, 2007. ISBN 978-0-393-92993-5
• All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression , University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8032-1890-1
• That the People Might Live: Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy, Cornell University Press, 2012.
• Companion to James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk (editor), University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

External links

• Arnold Krupat at Sarah Lawrence College