Roy Wolper

A full-time professor at Temple University from 1967 to 1998, and a writer of fiction, he co-founded The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, a review journal for English literature, and served as its editor for nearly fifty years.

[3] His published scholarship focuses on English and French eighteenth-century literature, including work on Alexander Pope,[4] Jewish studies[5] and antisemitism,[6] and Voltaire.

[9] The article raised quite a stir, with one critic saying it contained some "provocative insights", and "challenged the generally positive interpretation" of the ending of Candide, even while not accepting the argument.

[3] During this time, the journal expanded beyond reviewing scholarship concerning the early eighteenth-century Scriblerians to include the Kit-Cat Club (a change reflected in the journal's title) in addition to the period’s major novelists (Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne).

During his decades as coeditor of The Scriblerian, Wolper gained a reputation for hands-on copyediting, and a tribute in the journal notes "Roy could be merciless with copy"; he was praised for maintaining high academic standards for critical reviews, which the tribute noted is "so much more desirable and useful to our readers than the laudatory and obscurantist blurbs that book reviewing has too often become".