Robert B. Heilman

Dr. Heilman is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, where he chaired the Department of English from 1948-1971. He has written about Shakespeare in studies of King Lear (This Great Stage, Louisiana State University Press, 1948) and Othello (Magic in the Web, University of Kentucky Press, 1956), in various chapters of his volumes on genre (Tragedy and Melodrama, University of Washington Press, 1968, and The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society, University of Washington Press, 1978, winner of the Christian Gauss Prize of Phi Beta Kappa), in essays in various quadricentennial volumes (1964) and in his editions of Cymbeline (Penguin, 1965) and The Taming of the Shrew (New American Library, 1966). In 1974 he gave the Second Annual Shakespeare Lecture to the Shakespeare Society of America, of which he has since been a trustee. Retired since 1976 (and a widower since 1985), he produced two volumes of essays in 1991, The Southern Connection and The Workings of Fiction. Another volume of essays, The Professor and the Profession, was published by University of Missouri Press in 1999.