[2] He then earned a master's degree from Stanford University before receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1957.
[1] His first work, A Reader's Guide to Great 20th-Century English Novels, discussed writers such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad.
He went on to write extensive biographies about Conrad, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and George Eliot.
He also edited a multi-volume series, Biography and Source Studies, and co-edited a volume of letters between Conrad and Laurence Davies.
In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.