Nina Baym (born 1936) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She is best known as the General Editor of the renowned The Norton Anthology of American Literature, from 1991 - 2018. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over 40 years, from 1963 to 2004. Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance. While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated. It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales. “I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity. Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004). Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text." The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time. Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation. Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation. Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She died in 1971.

Josephine Donovan is the author of twelve books of nonfiction and the editor of four. A complete list of her publications is available on her web site: http://english.umaine.edu/people/jose.... Her fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature (especially nineteenth-century), and early modern women’s literature. Her work has been translated into seven languages (Japanese, French, Turkish, Swedish, Greek, German, and Chinese). Her most recent books are: Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story (2022); The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America (2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Aware; and The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Recently published: a second, revised edition of Women and the Rise of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) St. Martin’s, 1999; paperback, 2000). It was termed “a work of extraordinary significance” by the Choice reviewer, who wrote, “Donovan has defined the field clearly, forthrightly, often brilliantly. All future discussion of the subject begins here” (October 2000). Also recently published was European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury, 2010), a work in comparative literature. Donovan’s best-known book, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, first published in 1985, is now in its fourth edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) Amazon.com notes, “this book has established itself as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory.” A selection of other reviews of Donovan’s books may be found on her web site. Two of her books, Sarah Orne Jewett and Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love have recently been reprinted in revised editions on-line and in “print-on-demand” form by Cybereditions. Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II. She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine.