Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco, he has taught at Santa Clara, Williams, Dartmouth, Edinburgh, University College, London, and Sussex, where he was Professor and Chair of American Studies 1985-2001. He is now Honorary Professor of English at University College, London. His other books include a study of the rhetoric of the California gold rush, Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (1982); Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature: The Country Poor in the Great Depression (2011), about how the American country poor got treated in the novels, documentary photographs and bureaucratic prose of the New Deal liberals. His most recent book, The Great America Speech: Words and Monuments (2015), explores how certain speeches -monumental in American culture as well as in the physical monuments in Washington, D.C. - have formed a discourse of American identity that runs counter to the better known American dream of free enterprise and every man for himself. He has also written The American Long Poem (1977); 50 Facts that Should Change the USA (2008); and with John Sutherland, Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature (2011).
