Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow and has also been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and an Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-four published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry.