Alex Vernon

From Prairie Village, Kansas, Alex Vernon graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only literature major in his class), served as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Arkansas.

His books include a war memoir, “The Eyes of Orion”; an essayistic memoir, “most succinctly bred”; the cultural study “On Tarzan”; three works of literary criticism, “Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien”; “Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War”; and “Reading Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’: Glossary and Commentary” (called “indispensable” by other scholars); and the forthcoming biography “Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien.”