<P> Meyer Howard "Mike" Abrams (July 23, 1912--April 21, 2015), usually cited as M.H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp . Under Abrams's editorship, The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation . </P> <P> Abrams was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Long Branch, New Jersey . The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930 . He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession..., so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy ." After earning his bachelor's degree in 1934, Abrams won a Henry Fellowship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his tutor was I. A. Richards . He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received a master's degree in 1937 and a Ph. D. in 1940 . </P> <P> During World War II, he served at the Psycho - Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard . He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background . </P> <P> In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University . The literary critics Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and E.D. Hirsch, and the novelists William H. Gass and Thomas Pynchon were among his students . He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963 . As of March 4, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there . </P>

Studymode the deconstructive angel meyer h abrams 1912