William E. Cain is the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College. A scholar of American literature and American literary criticism, Professor Cain is the author of The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (Johns Hopkins UP), F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (U of Wisconsin Press), and Literary Criticism, 1900-1950: The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge UP) as well as the editor or co-editor of several college textbooks, including An Introduction to Literature (Longman), American Literature (Penguin), The Little, Brown Reader (Longman), and Literature for Composition (Longman).