Jay Cantor


Jay Cantor is an American novelist and essayist.
He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D.
He teaches at Tufts University.
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.
His work appeared in The Harvard Crimson.
He was on the 2009 ArtScience Competition jury.

Awards

Novels

To call Jay Cantor the thinking man's Tom Wolfe is a little unfair to Tom Wolfe, who surely believes, and with some justification, that he's the thinking man's Tom Wolfe. It's also a little unfair to Jay Cantor, who for all I know abhors Wolfe's politics and his fiction as well. Yet the scope of Cantor's ambition in his teeming new novel, Great Neck; his avid desire to capture the American scene entire; his crowd of characters, each absorbed in a private drama; certain thrillingly compact episodes that stand out like a prodigy among dull schoolkids; the hankering after abandoned tradition ; the stern morality operating just below the surface of the narrative -- all these things, it seems to me, link these two writers, both of whom ardently believe in the power of fiction to bring an American moment to life.