Dr J Alison Rosenblitt
About
I am an academic and a writer of literary non-fiction. I have 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 my 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.
My next book will be a trade biography of Cicero, with Princeton University Press. My two interests, in the ancient Roman world and in early 20th-century literary modernism, are united for me by my interest in the brutalities of power and in those who have the courage to speak about them.
Expertise
- Modernism
- Cummings, E.E
- Roman, Rome
- Roman demagogues
- Classics
- Ancient World
Selected publications
Media experience
I worked with Dalya Alberge on a feature for The Observer arising out of my most recent book, The Beauty of Living: E.E. Cummings in the Great War (W.W. Norton 2020). Please find a link here
I have also written for literary magazines, including Air Mail and Fiction Writers Review.
For a full list of my literary magazine or blog pieces, please visit (scroll down to ‘Other’ in the publications list).
I am represented by Georgina Capel Associates (in case of any enquiries connected to my literary work).
