Thomas G. Pavel

Thomas G. Pavel was born in Bucharest, Romania. Educated in his native country and in France, he pursued an academic career in Canada and the U.S. A lover of literature, he reflected on the nature of fictional worlds, their puzzling distance from the actual world, and their inexhaustible diversity. His latest book, The Lives of the Novel (2013), is a reader-friendly history of the novel as a genre, from its Ancient Greek origins to the present.

He taught at the University of Quebec in Montreal, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at Princeton University, and at the University of Chicago, where he serves now as the Gordon J. Laird Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Literature, Romance Languages, and Social Thought.