In addition to countless reviews, he also has written books on Nabokov, the trans-historical appeal of the oracle from the Greeks to the cinema, on the relations between contemporary fiction and storytelling, and on figures in the modern cultural pantheon including Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gabriel García Márquez and W. B. Yeats. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society.
Early life and education.
Michael George Wood was born in Lincoln, England. He obtained his BA in 1957 in French and German from St John's College, Cambridge, and his PhD in 1962, also from Cambridge, for a thesis entitled "The Dramatic Function of Symbol in Maeterlinck and Claudel".
Career.
From 1964 to 1982 Wood taught at Columbia University, becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and he then took up the Professorship of English Literature at the University of Exeter (1982–95). In 1995 he was appointed Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, which post he held until his retirement in 2013.
Personal life.
Wood lives in New Jersey with his wife, Elena Wood Uribe, and has three children: Gaby Wood, the literary director of the Man Booker Prize, Patrick Wood, CEO of Util, and Tony Wood, former editor at the "New Left Review" and author of "Chechnya: The Case For Independence".