# George Hutchinson

**Source**: https://americanstudies.cornell.edu/george-hutchinson
**Parent**: https://americanstudies.cornell.edu/faculty

## The Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric

### Overview

George Hutchinson’s teaching and research concern nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, American racial culture, and more recently literary ecology.  He also directs the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.  His most recent book is *Facing the Abyss:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s*, a 2019 finalist for Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award and the MLA’s Matei Calinescu Prize for 20th and 21st century literature and thought.  His book *In Search of Nella Larsen:  A Biography of the Color* Line, won the Christian Gauss Award, was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the *Washington Post*, and was an Editor’s Choice of the *New York Times Book Review* and *Booklist*. It also won a bronze medal for Biography in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by *Choice.*  His book *The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White*, was a finalist for the Rea Nonfiction Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History. He has also won the Darwin Turner Prize of the African American Literature Division of the MLA.  He has edited four books and a journal special issue concerning African American literature, most recently the Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s*Cane*, an Editors Choice of the *New York Times Book Review*.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.  He is currently working on a memoir of well-digging in the village of Zéguedéguin, Burkina Faso, in the 1970s; and a biography, *Jean Toomer: An American Life*, for Yale University Press. 

### Research Focus

- American Modernism
- African American Literature
- Race in American Culture
- Walt Whitman

## In the news

- [English professor publishes new edition of Jean Toomer’s “Cane”](/news/english-professor-publishes-new-edition-jean-toomers-cane)

## Courses - Spring 2026

- [AMST 4675 : The Environmental Imagination in American Literature](https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP26/class/AMST/4675)