Alan Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, has also taught at universities in England, France, and Ireland. His five authored books include Fictional Death and The Modernist Enterprise, Party Pieces: Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett, and Multivalence: The Moral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel, and monographs on Lawrence Durrell and William Faulkner.