Rate My Professor Andrew Delbanco

A distinguished scholar in Literature, Delbanco is the author of several influential books, including The Puritan Ordeal (1989), The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (1995), Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997), The Real American Dream (1999), Melville: His World and Work (2005)—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography—The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (2018)—a New York Times notable book that received the Anisfield-Wolf Prize, Lionel Trilling Award, and Mark Lynton History Prize—and College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012; second edition 2023). His essays on American literary and religious history and higher education appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and other journals. Delbanco has been awarded the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates (2006), named America’s Best Social Critic by Time magazine (2001), and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama (2012). In 2022, he delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and holds fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and National Endowment for the Humanities.