# Michael Gorra

michael gorra (born 17 February 1957) is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985. == Writing and Teaching == Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012) is a critical biography that uses its commentary on James’s 1881 novel, The Portrait of a Lady, as a point of entry not only into James’s life but also into the literary culture of the late nineteenth century. It was praised by Cynthia Ozick for presenting its subject with all “the sensuous immediacy of his quotidian reality: the rooms he lived in, the streets he trod, and the very texture of his inmost sensibility….