Faculty: Steven D. Olson

Steve Olson grew up in what some people still think of as the territory of South Dakota, was educated at universities in Minnesota, Texas, and Illinois, with a three-year stint in the U. S. Army in between. His teaching and research interests are primarily in American literature, and he finds himself mainly in the literature of the nineteenth century, sometimes keeping company with optimists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, sometimes with pessimists like Herman Melville and the later Mark Twain, and sometimes with the in-betweeners like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson. He has been known to venture into the twentieth century as far as to appreciate William Faulkner. Though a poor golfer, he still doesn't agree with Twain that "Golf is a good walk – spoiled." Walking around for its own sake has no purpose: one should be chasing after something, why not the impossible?