About the Author

Dr. Richard A. Branyon has experienced a rather peripatetic career in academia, but all of his past experiences have contributed to his appreciation of literature and other disciplines in the humanities. Dr. Branyon earned his MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill during the early 1980s with a special interest in finance and new ventures. He worked as an independent management consultant for about five years and provided advice to dozens of companies in many areas of management. However, the author became disenchanted with the world of business where success is always measured in money, and he returned to academia and pursued his MA and PhD in American and British literature. During graduate school, he pursued his interests in utopian and dystopian literature, the concepts of determinism and freedom of choice, literature related to psychology, and the influence of science and ethics on literature. The author's dissertation focused on recent theories of New Historicism and the ways that readers can interpret texts through cultural background and historical events. Although he maintains an interest in these areas, in more recent years he has expanded his interests to include women's literature, Southern literature, great love stories of Western culture, the role of medicine in literature, contemporary novels, and young adult novels. During the past 20 years, Dr. Branyon has taught at several major universities in North Carolina and often works with first-year students as they make the challenging transition from high school to college. He has taught courses in the survey of literature, American and British literature, world literature, composition and rhetoric, business communication, oral communication, and several interdisciplinary courses in the humanities including his favorite: Popular Culture and Literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Branyon has taught composition to first-year students every year during the past 20 years, and he has gained a wealth of information on methods to help students develop their communication abilities. The author has also served as mentor and tutor to dozens of students in English Education and helped them prepare for the content and pedagogy sections of the Praxis exams. Also, Dr. Branyon has worked with several graduate students who used his reference texts in their preparation for comprehensive oral exams in their Master's and doctorate programs.