Paul Zweig (July 14, 1935 – August 29, 1984) was an American poet, memoirist, and critic known for his study on Walt Whitman.[1][2]
Zweig was born in Brooklyn on July 14, 1935 and was raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Brighton Beach. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School,[3] entered Columbia University to study engineering but switched to literature after taking a class with Lionel Trilling. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1956 and M.A. in 1958.[4] He lived in France and studied at the University of Paris, earning his PhD in comparative literature before returning to the United States in 1966.[3]
Zweig taught at Columbia and Queens College and served as chair of its department of comparative literature in alternate years.[1] He also reviewed works of poetry, criticism, and fiction for the The New York Review of Books.[1]
Zweig received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 1984 for his study on Walt Whitman.[5][6] He was posthumously named a Finalist of Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.[7]