Author Biography
Norman Foerster was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1887. Before Sentences and Thinking, he wrote Writing and thinking: A Handbook of Composition and Revision, and A Handbook of Revision: Part II of Writing and Thinking, both with John Marcellus Steadman, Jr. Foerster was an educator and critic whose main interest was American higher education. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, followed by doctoral degrees from the University of the South, in Tennessee; Grinnell College, in Iowa; and the University of North Carolina. He taught English at the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, the University of Iowa, and at Duke University. One of his most influential books is Nature in American History (1923). Foerster was also known as an advocate and a spokesman for the New Humanism movement, of literary and social criticism, that had its first expressions in the late nineteenth century; He was central in the publication of Humanism and America : the intellectual manifesto of the New Humanists. He died in Palo Alto, California. John Marcellus Steadman, Jr. was born in Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1889. He graduated from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, where he also obtained a master's degree, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1916. Dr. Steadman served as instructor in Latin, and later headmaster at Wofford Fitting School, in Spartanburg, SC, and was a teaching fellow and instructor of English at the University of North Carolina. He was associate professor of English from 1919 to 1920, before becoming professor emeritus of English, at Emory University, GA. He wrote Writing and thinking: A Handbook of Composition and Revision, and A Handbook of Revision: Part II of Writing and Thinking, both with Norman Foerster, as well as several papers published by American Speech, a quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society, which was established in 1925 and is published by Duke University Press. He died in Tennessee in 1945, at the age of fifty-six years.
