Hello. My name is Alan Jacobs. I am Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
I am not linking to my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers here because the version currently available is so corrupted by typos and other errors that I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone purchase it. When the book was in production my mother was dying and I simply did not have the attentional resources to discover whether the copy editors had done their job competently, which, as it turns out, they had not. It is possible that eventually a corrected edition will be available, and if that happens I will link to the book here.
My next book, Tom and Wystan, will be an account of the relationship — not quite a friendship and not quite anything else definable — between T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. I will also soon commence work on two editorial projects:
- an annotated critical edition of Auden’s 1951 collection Nones, also for Princeton University Press
- an annotated critical edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1941 book The Mind of the Maker, for IVP
My most recent already-published book is Paradise Lost: A Biography — an entry in this series. You may order it at the Princeton University Press website or at Amazon.
Earlier: a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s 1955 collection of poems The Shield of Achilles. You may order it at the Princeton University Press website or at Amazon. Earlier still: Breaking Bread with the Dead. You may get a brief preview of it by reading this excerpt.You can find a mostly-complete list of my books here.
On micro.blog I post quotes, images, and (usually) quick thoughts, and I have an ever-ramifying long-term online project called Cosmos Malick. I have no truck with platforms; I am on the open web. Never forget: Indie Web Is Punk.
You may subscribe to a weekly digest of my micro.blog posts — I link there to everything I post elsewhere (at least, when I remember). I put a good deal of time and effort into my online writing, and am therefore very grateful when when readers support that work via my Buy Me a Coffee page.
If you would like to invite me to speak, first of all Thank you, but I am no longer doing public speaking, for reasons I explain here.
Here are a few essays I’ve published in the past few years that seem to me central to my thinking, such as it is:
Here are a few other online places where you can find my writing:
