About

Harold K. Bush is professor of English at Saint Louis University and author or editor of eight books, including Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors (2016), Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (2007) and Lincoln in His Own Time (2012). He was co-editor of The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Twichell (2017) and of Above the American Renaissance: David Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies (2018). His award-winning first novel, titled The Hemingway Files, was published in summer of 2017. He is presently at work on a study of neuroscience, spirituality and American literature and culture, tentatively entitled The Spiritual Life of the Mind: Science, Religion, and the Habits of the Human Brain. He has twice been named as a Fulbright scholar; most recently in spring of 2019, when he served as a Fulbright Specialist at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. His previous honors include being named a Fulbright Scholar in Freiburg, Germany; and a Fellow at the Waseda Institute of Advanced Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prof. Bush also has been recognized by his college for excellence in teaching and mentoring. He is Chair of the Board and co-founder of a non-profit in St. Louis, New Covenant Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to the urban poor. Most important of all: he is able to perceive the beauty and truth in all manner of mystical moments in his personal life: hot coffee and books in the morning, guitar and piano music, Cardinals baseball and SLU Billikens basketball, walking his three dogs Milli Vanilli, Bucky Valentino, and Max Million, gazing at the beauty of nature (especially trees), sharing meals with friends and family, and most of all the daily companionship and joy of his lovely wife Hiroko, a worthy gift from the Land of the Rising Sun.