About the Author

Dennis McCort (1941-) was born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, the "mile square city" on the Hudson, in the shadow of Manhattan. He writes of his experiences growing up there in the postwar industrial era before gentrification in his memoir, A Kafkaesque Memoir: Confessions from the Analytic Couch. McCort is now retired from Syracuse University where he taught German language and literature over a long career. He has authored scholarly books on Swiss writer C.F. Meyer and on the influence of Zen on such Western writers as J.D. Salinger, R.M. Rilke and Thomas Merton (Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen and Deconstruction). He has written a comic novel, titled The Man Who Loved Doughnuts, about a young professor who fails to get tenure at his upstate university and spends a lost weekend in lower Manhattan, and recently finished a second novel with the working title "Duncan," which he describes as "a thinking man's thriller."