Joan Mellen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
September 7, 1941
Joan Mellen | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joan Spivack September 7, 1941 |
| Died | June 30, 2025 (aged 83) |
| Occupations | Professor and writer |
| Spouse(s) | James Mellen (m. 1966, div. 1967); Ralph Schoenman (m. 1969, div. 1982) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Hunter College; Ph.D., City University of New York |
| Thesis | Morality in the novel : a study of five English novelists, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence (1968) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Temple University |
Joan Mellen (née Spivack; September 7, 1941 – June 30, 2025) was an American writer and professor of English and creative writing.
Mellen was born in the Bronx in 1941. Her father was a lawyer.[1]
She completed her undergraduate degree at Hunter College in 1962. She received a doctorate in English from the City University of New York.[1]
Career
She became a professor at Temple University in 1966, where she taught for many decades.[1] A full professor of English and creative writing by 2004, that year she received the Great Teacher Award from the university's board of trustees.[2]
She was the author of a number of books. Her early work in the 1970s was about film. In the following two decades, she wrote many biographies, while continuing to publish work about film.[1]
Her 1988 biography of Bobby Knight came after John Feinstein's best-selling A Season on the Brink, and presented a more positive view of the basketball coach. Sports journalists took this as an attack on Feinstein's work, sparking heated controversy.[1]
In 1994, Mellen published the first biography of Kay Boyle.[3]
Striking out in a different direction, in 2005, Mellen wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination, criticizing the Warren Commission investigation. Other books on mid-century political events followed. She published a memoir in 2024.[1]
Mellen participated in a Criterion Collection commentary track for Seven Samurai with film scholars David Desser, Tony Rayns, Stephen Prince, and Donald Richie.[4]