Edward Said is a man of parts. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to Christian Arab parents, he spent his adolescent years in Cairo, and then was educated in the United States at Princeton and Harvard. A specialist in English and comparative literature and an ad vocate of the new textual approaches in literary studies, he has taught at Harvard, has been a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins and Yale, and has been the Christian Gauss lecturer in criticism at Princeton; at present he is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in Humanities at Columbia. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Orientalism (1978), and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972-73) and the first Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia (1976).
Professor Said is also the most prominent political spokesman for the Palestinians in the United States. He has written widely on the Palestinian and more general Arab causes; these writings include The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), and After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986). His journalistic commentary on the Middle East appears frequently in this country and Eng land, and he is an official representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the U.S.
But Professor Said is more than a literary critic and an Arabist. He is a dedicated ama teur musician and pianist, with a particular interest in the great classics of Western music from Bach to
