Irwin was born in Houston, Texas, and received his bachelor's degree in English at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Following a stint in the US Navy, he received his Master's degree and Ph.D. in English from Rice University. He began his teaching career as an assistant professor in the English department at Johns Hopkins University in 1970, but left Johns Hopkins in 1974 to become the editor of The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia. Dr. Irwin returned to Johns Hopkins to become professor and chair of The Writing Seminars department. After that, he accepted a joint appointment in the English department and received an endowed chair, the Decker Professorship in the Humanities, in 1984.
Publications
Irwin's first book of literary criticism, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1975. This was followed by his first book of poems, The Heisenberg Variations, under his pen name John Bricuth, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1976. In 1980 he published his second book of literary criticism and scholarship, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, with the Yale University Press, and in 1994 he published his third book of criticism, Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges. and the Analytical Detective Story, with the Johns Hopkins University Press. The latter book won the Christian Gauss Prize from Phi Beta Kappa for the best scholarly book in the humanities published in 1994 and also won the Aldo Scaglione Prize in comparative literature from the Modern Language Association for the best scholarly book published in the field of comparative literature that year. His latest book, a narrative poem published by Johns Hopkins University press in 2005, is titled, As Long As It's Big.
Partial bibliography
Academic
Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner.
American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance.
The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story.
Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir.
Hart Crane's Poetry: Appollinaire Lived in Paris, I Live in Cleveland, Ohio.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction: An Almost Theatrical Innocence.
