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picture of Glenn Meeter

Glenn Meeter

Professor Emeritus

20th-century American Literature, Bible as Literature, Creative Writing

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Email: gmeeter@niu.edu

Educational Background


Ph.D. University of Iowa; 1966

M.A.T. Vanderbilt Unviersity; 1956

B.A. Calvin College; 1955

Professional Interests


Glenn Meeter retired in 1998 from Northern Illinois University, where he was Professor of English, teaching courses in fiction-writing and American literature and serving as department chair from 1984-1990. He has written a novel (Letters to Barbara, 1981), and his short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Review, Redbook, Epoch, The Literary Review and elsewhere. A number of them have been reprinted, most frequently “Hard Row” (Redbook’s Famous Fiction, 1977, and several textbook anthologies) and “A Harvest” (Innovative Fiction, 1972; Experimentelle amerikanische Prosa, 1977; and Not Normal, Illinois, 2009). These two and ten others are collected in Stories of Four Decades, 2009.

His literary essays include work on Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth; John Updike and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Kurt Vonnegut; and the Canadian writer Rudy Wiebe. Articles on William Faulkner have appeared in Studies in the Novel (1988), Faulkner and Religion (1991), Faulkner and Ideology (1992), and Mississippi Quarterly (Summer 1996), along with entries in A William Faulkner Encyclopedia (1999).

After retiring, he has delivered papers on Owen Lovejoy, the abolitionist clergyman and congressman, at conferences on Illinois history in 2002 (“The Meaning of Milton in Lovejoy’s Anti-Slavery Rhetoric”; “’War of the Brothers’: Owen and Joseph Lovejoy”) and 2003 (“Biblical Analogies for Slavery, the War, and the Union: Owen Lovejoy’s January 1862 Speech on Prosecuting the War”). In 2004, the paper on Milton in Lovejoy’s anti-slavery rhetoric was delivered at Baylor University’s Pruit Memorial Symposium on Slavery. In 2006, the paper on Lovejoy’s biblical analogies for the Civil War was accepted for a conference on “Faith and Violence: Jihad and Holy War” held at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, New York.