Dr J Alison Rosenblitt
About
Dr J Alison Rosenblitt is an academic and a writer of literary non-fiction. She has written two academic books: E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (OUP 2016; winner of a CAMWS First Book Award) and Rome after Sulla (Bloomsbury Academic 2019).
In 2020, W.W. Norton published her first trade book (literary non-fiction): The Beauty of Living: E.E. Cummings in the Great War, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The Beauty of Living is a slice-of-life biography, telling the story of Cummings’ formative years at Harvard, where he encountered a world of classicizing literary Decadence and the emerging currents of literary modernism, and then his time as a volunteer ambulance driver in France, unjustly imprisoned in a brutal detention centre after his fellow-driver and best friend in the unit wrote letters home which spoke with excessive frankness about low morale and war atrocities.
Dr Rosenblitt's next book will be a trade biography of Cicero, with Princeton University Press. Her two interests, in the ancient Roman world and in early 20th-century literary modernism, are united by an interest in the brutalities of power and in those who have the courage to speak about them.
Expertise
- Roman, Rome
- Roman demagogues
- Classics
- Ancient World
- Cicero
Selected publications
Media experience
Dr J Alison Rosenblitt worked with Dalya Alberge on a feature for The Observer arising out of her book, The Beauty of Living: E.E. Cummings in the Great War (W.W. Norton 2020). See: Revealed: how a Parisian sex worker stole the heart of poet EE Cummings | The Guardian. She has also written for literary magazines, including Air Mail and Fiction Writers Review. For a full list of literary magazine or blog pieces, please visit (scroll down to ‘Other’ in the publications list). Dr Rosenblitt is represented by Georgina Capel Associates (in case of any enquiries connected to literary work).
