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A brief W. R. Robinson biography A W. R. Robinson bibliography A W. R. Robinson lexicon Quotes from W. R. Robinson "'Like Light': The Movie Theory of W. R. Robinson" an essay by David Lavery Robinson Photo Gallery Friends of Bill Photo Gallery

W. R. Robinson Biography

W. R. Robinson was born in 1927 in Steubenville, Ohio. He received his BA (1952), MA (1956), and PhD (1962) at Ohio State University, where he worked under Roy Harvey Pearce. He went on to teach at the University of Virginia (1962-67), and since 1967 at the University of Florida, where he recently retired. His Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act was published by Case Western Reserve Press in 1967. That same year, an anthology of essays on film by various hands, Man and the Movies, edited by Robinson, was published by Louisiana State University Press. (It was later reissued by Penguin.) His own essay in the volume, "The Movies, Too, Will Make You Free," remains perhaps the best single statement of his ideas on the movies. In subsequent years he published a series of essays on the movies in journals like Georgia Review and the now defunct Contempora. During the 1970s and 1980s he was an influential professor of literature and film at the University of Florida, teaching courses on Movies as a Narrative Art, The Metaphysics of Modern Literature, and seminars on Ernest Hemingway, the western and the detective movie, Antonioni, Fellini, and Sam Peckinpah.

This World Wide Web Site is devoted to making his movie theory better known.