Alison Rosenblitt

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 center 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 twentieth-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.