Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Benfey has written four books about the American Gilded Age including A Summer of Hummingbirds, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
