Verlyn Klinkenborg

Member of the New York Times Editorial Board

My academic province is the 18th century, especially Samuel Johnson. I’m currently working on William Cobbett, the great 19th-century agricultural and political reformer. I’ve been teaching and thinking about nonfiction creative writing since 1982, as well as publishing essays and articles in many places, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and National Geographic. I was a member of the New York Times Editorial Board from 1997 to 2013, my interests have left the ark and multiplied. I write about cultural issues of all sorts. I pay close attention to questions of public land use, especially in the American West, and species protection and extinction. And I write about farms—the industrial kind and my own small farm in New York state. I seem always to be thinking about sailing these days, though my next book will be about the decade I spent working with horse trainers in Wyoming and Montana.

Selected Publications

- “Green and Pleasant Land,” The New York Review of Books, 27 September 2018

- “A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course,” The New York Review of Books, 22 February 2018

- More Scenes From A Rural Life (Princeton Architectural Press, Spring 2013)

- Several Short Sentences About Writing (Knopf, 2012)

- Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (Knopf, 2006)

- The Rural Life (Little Brown, 2003)

- The Last Fine Time (Knopf, 1992; reissued by University of Chicago Press)

- Making Hay (Vintage, 1986)

Courses

The Genre of the Sentence (English Department), A Local Habitation And A Name; Or, Writing the World (FES/EVST)