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Area of FocusAbout Jay's Work
Jay Cantor is a writer of fiction and literary theory whose works explore such topics as political violence, race relations, and the boundaries between high art and popular culture.
Cantor’s book of essays, The Space Between: Literature and Politics (1981), is a meditation on the problems raised by the gap between culture and politics. He has extended and revised his thinking in On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society (1991). He is the author of three novels: The Death of Che Guevara (1983), a combination of history and myth, Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (1988), based on George Herriman’s cartoon character, and Great Neck (2003), which chronicles the lives of a group of friends growing up during the tumultuous years of the civil rights and Vietnam War eras. He is working on a new novel set in both 17th-century England and Boston of the 1970s.
Biography
Cantor has been a professor of English at Tufts University since 1977.
Cantor received a B.A. (1970) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (1976) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Last updated January 1, 2005.
Published on August 1, 1989
