David Cowart

David Cowart took his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama. After teaching in Ethiopia in the Peace Corps, he took an M.A. at Indiana University, then served two years in the U.S. Army (in Panama). He took his doctorate at Rutgers University in 1977.

Cowart taught for some eighty semesters at the University of South Carolina, where he rose through the academic ranks to recognition as a Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities and a Board of Trustees Professor. For three years, in the mid-nineties, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in English.

He was honored with a number of teaching awards, as well as important grants and fellowships, including an NEH Summer Stipend and a year-long NEH Fellowship. He held Fulbright chairs at the University of Helsinki and at Syddansk Universitet in Odense, Denmark. In addition to lecturing in Latvia, Germany, and the Czech Republic, he presented keynote addresses at international conferences in England, Poland, Japan, and Germany. In 2005, he toured Japan as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer.

Retired from teaching in 2017, he remains active as a literary critic. In his major scholarly work, Cowart has focused on American fiction in the period after 1945. In addition to the books listed on his Amazon.com author page, he is the author of approximately one hundred articles, notes, and reviews. His book on Don DeLillo won the SAMLA Studies Award in 2003. He is now working on a ninth book, on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

In 2021, he edited the wartime memoir of his father, Eugene G. Cowart: Green Bars: An American Bomber Pilot's Personal Story, 1942-1945.