Rebel

Stephen Greenblatt, a genuine "Renaissance Man". A teacher in the English Department at Harvard, he is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”. He is a writer who reinvents "centuries-old literature" and makes it relevant and interesting for modern audiences.

Growing up, a constant in his life that continues is fascination with the power of stories. Influenced by his parents, they were storytellers (not as jobs, but their personalities). Stephen's family had lead him to believe that stories are "an enormously powerful way of conveying things that are most important to a human being." His mother told narrative stories to teach Stephen life lessons, while his father knew almost everyone in Boston and heard their stories.

 Living in a Jewish household, there were not many books to read. His parents respected learning, but there were simply not a lot of books to read outside of typical Jewish texts. Stephen's parents did not go to college, Stephen's brother was the first to go to college.

Stephen had an especially close relationship with the books "A Thousand and One Nights" and "Richard Halliburton's Book and Marvels." He had always felt a, "peculiar relationship between books and the memory of the dead."

Having attended public school, Stephen was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have influential teachers. These teachers left “an enormously powerful impression on [him].” They are a “model of intellectual integrity.” There was no particular author or work that truly ignited a passion for literature. As a whole, Stephen was able to read different books in grammar school and high school to discover what he truly enjoyed.

            In junior high school, Stephen had his first experience with Shakespeare. His teacher had chosen “As You Like It,” if it were up to Stephen to decide, his choice would have been “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” or “Romeo and Juliet.” In his senior year of high school, Stephen’s teacher spent an entire semester on “King Lear.” When his teacher did not understand something, he would admit that to the class. This was groundbreaking for Stephen, because the teacher had to come to terms with not being able to understand it. His teacher was willing to admit this.

            Stephen was following the track of going to Law School and  following the footsteps of his brother and his father. While in Istanbul, Stephen received the news that he accepted to study abroad. Stephen was accepted to Yale Law School, but after receiving his acceptance to travel abroad he declined the acceptance from Yale. Stephen then spent two years at Cambridge, the entered the PhD program for English at Yale. “His thesis was published as a book by the Yale University Press.” His book was titled “Three Modern Satirists,” about Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

        

            After Stephen wrote the Ralegh book, he wrote “Renaissance Self-Fashioning.” Shakespeare only appeared in one of the six chapters in his book. This chapter, “Othello”, required a lot of time and energy. “[He] felt [he] had succeeded in doing something that [he] had not been able to do until this point — to merge [his] historical and literary interests in the past with the full force of [his] engagement in the present.” Shakespeare was a figure that Stephen could connect the past to the present. “[Shakespeare] grasped what he would have to do for his art to survive.” Shakespeare himself, was able to connect the past to his own present.