Trygve Thoreson

Trygve Thoreson is Professor Emeritus of English and Humanities at William Rainey Harper College. At a place like Harper, teachers are expected to teach a little bit of everything, so while his primary research background was in American literature, Thoreson also taught writing courses, general literature, and introductory humanities courses that covered a wide variety of liberal-arts subject areas. At Harper he designed and developed architecture tours of downtown Chicago for humanities students and in retirement serves as a volunteer host at the Chicago Architecture Center.

He is the author of Harper College, The First Fifty Years: William Rainey Harper College 1967-2017 as well as academic literary work that has appeared in publications such as The South Carolina Review, Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, Studies in American Humor, and Mark Twain Journal.

His most recent work (2026) is a dual biography entitled Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan: Personal Histories of Two Icons of American Architecture, published by the University of Illinois Press.