Weber, Myles

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Weber, Myles

PERSONAL:

Education: Augsburg College, B.A.; George Washington University, M.A. (international affairs); Syracuse University, M.A. (English); University of Maryland, College Park, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Ashland University, 401 College Ave., Ashland, OH 44805. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Served as an economic officer with the U.S. Foreign Service for seven years, with posts in Stockholm, Sweden, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Washington, DC; Ashland University, Ashland, OH, assistant professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Individual artist fellowship for literary criticism, Ohio Arts Council, 2005.

WRITINGS:

Middlebrow Annoyances: American Drama in the 21st Century, Gival Press (Arlington, VA), 2003.

Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2005.

Also author of produced plays. Contributor of literary criticism to periodicals, including Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Salmagundi; contributor of articles on drama and contemporary American fiction to periodicals, including New England Review, Comparative American Studies, and Studies in American Fiction.

SIDELIGHTS:

Myles Weber is an educator and literary critic whose book Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish studies writers whose careers were advanced by long gaps during which they did not publish. In reviewing the volume in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Jason Goldsmith described the chapters on Tillie Olsen and Ralph Ellison as "the most dynamic." Weber also studies the careers of Henry Roth and J.D. Salinger and examines the popularity of all four writers and the cult-like celebrity that they enjoyed. In the case of Salinger, after publishing his novel Catcher in the Rye, and several other works and stories over a total of a dozen years, he stopped publishing his work in 1963. Salinger continues to write, however, but no longer publishes, and refuses interviews with the media. As of this writing, he lives in seclusion in New Hampshire. Goldsmith wrote: "Refreshingly free of the jargon of literary criticism, Weber's slim book is both theoretically savvy and delightfully accessible."