Linda Simon

Linda Simon (born 12 December 1946) is professor emerita of English at Skidmore College.

Early life

Simon was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 12 December 1946, and grew up in Flushing, New York. She is the oldest daughter of Samuel M. Perlin and Kay Perlin. She attended Queens College, New York, and holds a master's degree from New York University, and earned a PhD in English from Brandeis University, where her mentors included Milton Hindus and Michael T. Gilmore.

Teaching

She taught in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University, serving as director of the writing center before joining the English department at Skidmore College, where she was a professor and department chair. At Skidmore, she taught in two abroad programs in London and Paris, where she conducted research for a biography of Coco Chanel. Simon lives in Oakland, California. She is professor emerita of English at Skidmore College.[1]

Writing

A trip to Paris inspired Simon's first book, Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait (Avon, 1974), which then led to her writing a biography of Stein's companion Alice B. Toklas. Simon is drawn to biographical subjects who defied expectations in forging their identity and life path, including Toklas, the philosopher and psychologist William James, and fashion designer Coco Chanel. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 1997. Her research for a cultural history, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray was supported by a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

A past president of the William James Society, since 2006, she has served as general editor of the society's journal William James Studies, and has contributed introductions to volumes V and VI of The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley.

Selected publications
  • The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (Doubleday, 1977; University of Nebraska Press, 1991)
  • Thornton Wilder: His World (Doubleday, 1979)
  • Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (Harcourt, 1998; University of Chicago Press, 1999)
  • Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Harcourt, 2004; Harvest, 2005)
  • The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master (Camden House, 2007)
  • Gertrude Stein Remembered (University of Nebraska Press, 1994) (Editor)
  • William James Remembered (University of Nebraska Press, 1996)
  • Coco Chanel 2011.[2][3]
  • The Greatest Shows on Earth: A History of the Circus. 2014.[4]
  • Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper. 2017.[5]
gollark: You claimed to be a qualified electrical engineer, see.
gollark: You can't say ? because you exploded.
gollark: Apparently the patent expired now, vaguely relatedly.
gollark: It's not the same as actually developing the entire standard, but it's something I guess.
gollark: > In the early 1990s, O'Sullivan led a team at the CSIRO which patented, in 1996, the use of a related technique for reducing multipath interference of radio signals transmitted for computer networking. This technology is a part of all recent WiFi implementationsAh, so they contributed somewhat to WiFi.

References
  1. "Linda Simon". Skidmore.edu. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  2. "Coco Chanel, By Linda Simon". Independent.co.uk. 2 October 2011. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  3. Bloom (22 April 2015). "Q&A With Linda Simon". Bloom-site.com. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  4. "The Greatest Shows on Earth". Press.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
  5. "Lost Girls by Linda Simon from Reaktion Books". Reaktionbooks.co.uk. Retrieved 20 August 2017.


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