Lawrence Ingalls Buell (born 1939) is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism. He is the 2007 recipient of the Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary studies, the “highest professional award that the American Literature Section of the MLA can give.”
He won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism for his 2003 book on Ralph Waldo Emerson. His Writing for an Endangered World won the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies. He retired from Harvard in 2011.
Books in order of publication:
Literary Transcendentalism (1973)
New England Literary Culture (1986)
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard University Press (1995)
Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond, Harvard University Press (2001)
Emerson, Harvard University Press (2003)
The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005)
The American Transcendentalists (2006) Editor
Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007) Editor with Wai Chee Dimock
The Dream of the Great American Novel, Harvard University Press (2014)
Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently – (2023)
Oak Lawn Library Friends 