FLORA, Joseph M(artin) 1934-

PERSONAL: Born February 9, 1934, in Toledo, OH; son of Raymond Dwight (a factory worker) and Frances (Ricica) Flora; married Glenda Christine Lape (a correspondence instructor), January 30, 1959; children: Ronald James, Stephan Ray, Peter Joseph, David Benjamin. Education: University of Michigan, B.A., 1956, M.A., 1957, Ph.D., 1962; University of California, Berkeley, summer study, 1957.

ADDRESSES: Home—505 Caswell Rd., Chapel Hill, NC 27514. Offıce—Department of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-0001. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, instructor in English, 1961-62; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, instructor, 1962-64, assistant professor, 1964-67, associate professor, 1967-77, professor of English, 1977—; acting department chair, 1980-81, department chair, 1980-91; assistant dean of graduate school, 1967-72, associate dean, 1977-1978; assistant to chair, Duke University, University of North Carolina Cooperative Program in Humanities, 1963-67. Visiting professor at University of New Mexico, summer, 1976, 1996.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, Western Literature Association (board of directors, 1978-81, 1983-86; vice president, 1990; president, 1992), South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Hemingway Society, Thomas Wolfe Society (vice president 1993-95; president, 1995-97), Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Eta Sigma.

AWARDS, HONORS: Mayflower Award, 1982, for Hemingway's Nick Adams.

WRITINGS:

Vardis Fisher, Twayne (New York, NY), 1965.

William Ernest Henley, Twayne (New York, NY), 1970.

Frederick Manfred, Boise State University (Boise, ID), 1974.

(Editor) James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest, College and University Press (New Haven, CT), 1975.

(Editor, with Robert Bain and Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1979.

Hemingway's Nick Adams, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1982.

(Editor) The English Short Story, 1880-1945: A Critical History, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1985.

(Editor, with Robert Bain) Fifty Southern Writers before 1900: A Bio-Biographical Sourcebook, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1987.

(Editor, with Robert Bain) Fifty Southern Writers after1900, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1987.

Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1989.

(Editor, with Robert Bain) Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

(Editor, with Robert Bain) Contemporary Poets,Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1994.

(Editor) Rediscovering Vardis Fisher: Centennial Essays, University of Idaho Press (Moscow, ID), 2000.

(Editor, with Lucinda H. MacKethan) The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2002.

Contributor of articles to journals.

SIDELIGHTS: A professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Joseph M. Flora has specialized in literature of the American South, editing with Robert Bain four reference books on the topic for Greenwood Press. After publishing the biographical titles Fifty Southern Writers before 1900 and Fifty Southern Writers after 1900, they devoted their attention to more contemporary American writers of the South in the critically acclaimed reference works Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book and Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South contains forty-nine essays on individual writers, written by that many different scholars, as well as bibliographic updates on nine novelists from Fifty Southern Writers after 1900. As Thomas Bonner noted in the Mississippi Quarterly, this volume "provides a helpful resource" in which the editors do a "heroic" job of holding the individual contributors to the same standard of scholarship.

Nearly a decade later, Flora and coeditor Lucinda H. MacKethan published The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs, a massive and far-ranging encyclopedia with over 500 entries on many topics related to southern literature. Because biographies of southern literary figures are available elsewhere, the editors limited the number of biographies included in this volume to about a dozen, plus a few nonliterary Southern figures of importance. Flora and MacKethan supervised the contributions of many scholars from a variety of universities. Like Flora's earlier reference works, The Companion to Southern Literature received praise from critics. In the Bloomsbury Review, Richard Lynch called the work "important," as did a Booklist reviewer, who called the work an "excellent resource" because it is "well-written, meticulously edited, and thoughtfully organized."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Literature, June, 1994, review of Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, p. 423.

American Reference Books Annual, Volume 25, 1994, review of Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, p. 500.

Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 2002, Richard Lynch, review of The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs.

Booklist, April 1, 2002, p. review of The Companion to Southern Literature, p. 1351.

Choice, January, 1994, A. J. Adam, review of Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, pp. 748-749; April, 1995, S. R. Moore, review of Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, p. 1270; April, 2002, A. E. Bonnette, review of The Companion to Southern Literature, p. 1392.

Library Journal, November 15, 2001, Peter Dollard, review of The Companion to Southern Literature, p. 60; April 15, 2003, review of The Companion to Southern Literature, p. 41.

Mississippi Quarterly, fall, 1994, Thomas Bonner, Jr., review of Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, pp. 673-674.

Reference & Research Book News, March, 1994, review of Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, p. 48.

Southern Library Journal, fall, 1996, Robert J. Phillips, Jr., review of Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South, pp. 93-96.*