Stephen Greenblatt books

Art History

Norton Anthology of English Literature Reading Order

Plays

Stephen Greenblatt Biographies Reading Order

Stephen Greenblatt Literary Reading Order

Stephen Greenblatt has been the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000, where he serves as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1964 and studying at Cambridge as a Fulbright scholar, he taught at UC Berkeley for over two decades before moving to Harvard. His work in the 1980s established New Historicism as a major force in literary studies, particularly through his 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.

He has received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which tells the story of how a rediscovered ancient Roman poem changed Renaissance thought. His Shakespeare biography Will in the World became a bestseller and National Book Award finalist. In 2016, the Norwegian government awarded him the Holberg Prize for his body of work.

His more recent work has moved beyond academic audiences. Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) looks at how Shakespeare explored authoritarian leadership through characters like Richard III and Macbeth. Dark Renaissance (2025) is a biography of Christopher Marlowe that reconstructs the dangerous world of Elizabethan theater, espionage, and religious conflict.