H.R. Stoneback

Harry Robert Stoneback (born July 14, 1941 in Philadelphia) is an American academic, poet, and folk singer. A Hemingway, Durrell, and Faulkner scholar of international distinction, Stoneback—who, as an itinerant musician in the early 1960s, collaborated with Jerry Jeff Walker (a period immortalized in Walker's 1970 song "Stoney") and played with Bob Dylan at Gerde's Folk City shortly after the Dylan's arrival in New York—is best known for illuminating the religious and folkloric undertones of Modernist and allied regional literatures in over 100 essays. Joe Haldeman has described Stoneback as the "eminence grise" of Hemingway studies. In recent years, Stoneback has played an integral role in the critical reappraisal of Richard Aldington and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, co-editing two anthologies of literary criticism about Roberts and serving as honorary director of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. A former senior Fulbright Scholar at Peking University, Saint-John Perse Fellow of the French-American Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris (where he concurrently served as director of the now-defunct American Center for Students and Artists), he is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he has taught since 1969 and once curated the Norman Studer Archives. As of January 2014, he is President of the Ernest Hemingway Society.