William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008.
11 Facts About William Deresiewicz
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William Deresiewicz is the author of A Jane Austen Education, Excellent Sheep, and The Death of the Artist.
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William Deresiewicz's criticism directed to a popular audience has appeared in The Nation, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harper's.
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William Deresiewicz's father, Herbert Deresiewicz, emigrated from Czechoslovakia and was a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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William Deresiewicz grew up in a Jewish home and attended a yeshiva high school.
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William Deresiewicz has described himself as being "thrown out" of the high school and has imagined that he might have been charged with "gross insubordination and incipient atheism".
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William Deresiewicz taught courses in modern British fiction, Great Books, Indian fiction, and writing, among other areas.
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William Deresiewicz left academia in 2008 after being denied tenure to become a full-time writer.
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William Deresiewicz then uses Al Gore and John Kerry, graduates of Harvard and Yale, as examples of politicians who are out of touch with the lives of most Americans.
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In October 2009, William Deresiewicz delivered a speech titled "Solitude and Leadership" to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
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In 2020, William Deresiewicz published The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech on how artists sustain themselves in the Information Age.