Schmidgall, Gary

Professor
1412HW / Office Hour:
(212) 772-5117
gschmidg@hunter.cuny.edu

Gary Schmidgall received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1974.

His first book was Literature as Opera (Oxford, 1977), a study of operatic versions of a wide variety of literary masterpieces; later, in 1990, Oxford also published his Shakespeare and Opera. In 1980 the University of California Press published his Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic, which explored the influences of the aesthetics of the court of James I on the romances, particularly The Tempest. In 1990 the University Press of Kentucky published his Shakespeare and the Poet's Life, the writing of which began on a Guggenheim Fellowship. This study explored a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and epyllia and continue writing plays?

In the 1990s Schmidgall turned to biography-to gay biography in particular. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar appeared in 1994 (Penguin), and in 1997 his Walt Whitman: A Gay Life appeared, also from Penguin (it won a Modern Language Association Prize in 1998). Work on Whitman led him to see the need for an edition of Leaves of Grass that offered a chronological selection of its poems in their first published form; this appeared from St. Martin's Press in 1999. Most recently, in 2001, his edition of selections from the private conversations of Whitman, Intimate with Walt, appeared as the inaugural title in the "Iowa Whitman Series" of the University of Iowa Press.

For nearly ten years, Schmidgall has served as the founding co-editor, later editor, of CUNY Matters, the news magazine for the City University. Among his current projects are translations from the Latin of Martial's epigrams, an original play, an original opera libretto, and essays on Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.

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