Sam Coale, who has been teaching American literature and culture at Wheaton College in Massa-chusetts since 1968 and is the A. Howard Meneely Professor of English, is the author of In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer (1985), William Styron Revisited (1991), Paul Theroux (1987), Anthony Burgess (1981) and John Cheever (1977). His latest work, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Medi-ums of American Romance (1998), deals with mesmerism as a structural principle in Hawthorne’s dark romances. He has also written many articles on such writers as Joan Didion, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Jerzy Kosinski, Joyce Carol Oates and William Faulkner. A recipient of Fulbright awards, an NEH Fellowship, and USIA grants, he has taught and lectured in Brazil, Belarus, Poland, India, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Sweden, Greece and England. He is a book reviewer for the Providence Journal and a theatre reviewer and feature writer for the East Side Monthly.
He is currently at work on a book about conspiracy in American culture and contemporary fiction and lives in Providence, RI, with his wife, son, and basset.
