M. H. Abrams

Meyer Howard Abrams (1912–2015) was an American literary critic and scholar whose work helped shape modern study of Romanticism and literary theory. Educated at Harvard University, he spent most of his career at Cornell University, where he became a leading teacher and interpreter of English literature. Abrams is best known for *The Mirror and the Lamp* (1953), a landmark study tracing the shift from classical ideas of art as imitation to Romantic conceptions of the creative imagination. He also served as general editor of *The Norton Anthology of English Literature*, a widely used classroom anthology that influenced how generations of students encountered English literary history.