Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches British and American Romanticism, paying special attention to the relationship between literature and psychology. Wilson has recently turned his academic training into a major new trade title, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). The book, which appeared on the bestseller lists of the L.A. Times and the Calgary Herald, was featured many national and international media venues—including NBC’s Today Show, UNC TV’s Bookwatch, TVO’s The Agenda, NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, the BBC’s Today Programme, and CBC’s The Current. Against Happiness also received coverage in several key periodicals—such as Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Charlotte Observer, The Winston-Salem Journal, and The Spectator—and was favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Booklist, Bookforum, the Globe and Mail, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Playboy.com, Publisher’s Weekly, the Raleigh News and Observer, and America: The National Catholic Weekly. Excerpts from the book will be appearing or have appeared in The Longman Reader (a composition textbook for college students), The Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Chronicle Review, the L.A. Times, and The Age (a major Australian newspaper). Currently, the book is being translated into many languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Croatian, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. Before publishing this book, Wilson gained prestige in the academic world for several distinguished books on subjects ranging from ecology to melancholy to technology to the religious aspects of film. The titles of these books are The Strange World of David Lynch (Continuum, 2007); Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (Continuum, 2006); The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (State University of New York Press, 2006); Coleridge’s Melancholia (University Press of Florida, 2004); The Spiritual History of Ice (Palgrave Macmillan); Romantic Turbulence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and Emerson's Sublime Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). These books, along with his numerous articles on various cinematic and literary subjects, have garnered Wilson several awards, including a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. and the university-wide prize for excellence in research at Wake Forest University. Wilson is currently at work on a piece of literary nonfiction, a memoir called The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace. He lives in Winston-Salem with his wife Sandi and his daughter Una. When he is not writing or spending time with his family, he enjoys watching films, especially the great Hollywood films of the 30s and the 40s.
Humphrey Bogart in a publicity still for The Maltese Falcon (1941)