Masterpieces of World Literature

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to technology and the arts and include the Norton Anthology of World Literature, which has brought 4,000 years of literature to students across the globe; The Written World, a Wall Street Journal bestseller that has been translated into twenty languages; and Literature for a Changing Planet, which draws lessons from world literature for addressing climate change. His more recent book, Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop is a global history of the arts and humanities. He is a member of the European Academy and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, the Humboldt Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award.

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he is the founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature. His books include, What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020) and Around the World in 80 Books (2021). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004, 2009), and editor or co-editor of two dozen other books. In 2023, he was awarded the Balzan Foundation Prize for his work in world literature.