Tony Tanner (scholar)

Paul Antony Tanner (18 March 1935 – 5 December 1998) was a British literary critic of the mid-20th century, and a pioneering figure in the study of American literature. He was a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he taught and studied for 38 years, from 1960 until his death in 1998.

Early life

Paul Antony Tanner was born in Richmond, Surrey, and brought up in South London during the Second World War. His father was a civil servant and his mother had trained as a teacher. He attended Raynes Park County Grammar School and, after National Service, matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. His teachers included two great Shakespearean scholars, A. P. Rossiter and Philip Brockbank, both of whom were to be lasting influences on Tanner.

In 1958 he won a Harkness Fellowship to Berkeley, California where he first encountered post-war American literature and culture and met his first wife Marcia Tanner (née Albright), the American art critic and curator.

Later life and career

In 1960 Tanner took up a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge to begin a doctoral study of the Transcendentalists at a time when American literature was not taught widely at English universities, and its study was considered relatively novel. Tanner's thesis was published in 1965 as the book Reign of Wonder, and, on the strength of its merits, he was appointed to a post in the English faculty. From then on, Tanner took an active role in promoting the inclusion of American literature in the English syllabus, lecturing, examining and advising widely on his chosen field.