Edward Margolies is an American literary critic and biographer.
Education
After the war, he attended Brown University on the G.I. Bill graduating in 1950. After graduating from Brown, Margolies attended New York University, obtaining his Doctor of Philosophy His 1964 dissertation was entitled A critical analysis of the works of Richard Wright.
Career
Margolies was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the youngest of four children, having three older sisters. Margolies served in World World War II, guarding German and Italian prisoners of war.
He became a professor of English and American Studies at College of Staten Island of the City University of New New York
In 1977, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He taught at the Sorbonne (University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle) in 1979.
Margolies has written a number of books exploring the work of African American writers in the United States. In 1968, the book Native Sons was published.
Native Sons is the study of eight twentieth-century African-American writers: William Attaway, Chester Himes, William Demby, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and LeRoi Jones.
Margolies" essays explore the work of these writers from the perspective of the African American experience. The book, edited by Margolies, is a collection of works by African American authors such as West.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, William Demby, among others In 1969, The Art of Richard Wright was published.
The book was the first book-length critical appraisal of the writer Richard Wright.
Margolies" work on Wright was described as "seminal," by Yoshinobu Hakutani in African American Review. Margolies" later works include "The Several Lives of Chester Himes," a biography of the black expatriate detective writer Chester Himes.
"Which Way Did He Go," an examination of the private eye detective in the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald. And "New York and the Literary Imagination: The City in Twentieth Century Fiction and Drama," an exploration of how 20th-century writers have portrayed New York City.
Politics
Margolies explored how Wright"s work dealt with certain themes: freedom, existential horror, and black nationalism.