Edward Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, Palestine. In the 1947 partition of Palestine, he and his family became refugees and moved to Cairo where they lived with relatives. He went to St. George's, an American school and then later to Victoria College. He was expelled from Victoria College in 1951 and his parents sent him to Mount Hermon Preparatory School in Massachusetts (Ahluwalia and Ashcroft 1).
His father was strict about discipline in both work and study. His hobbies as a young man were reading novels and listening to classical music (Ahluwalia and Ashcroft 1). He learned to speak several languages and to play the piano. As a young man, he attended the Juilliard School of Music and became quiet skilled at playing the piano (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 2). He graduated form Princeton University where he received his Masters Degree and then attended Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. His dissertation was on Joseph Conrad. He then took a position in Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature.
When the Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1967, he began to review his career in Comparative Literature. He began thinking of his own identity as a Palestinian. At this time his life changed and he began to get involved with his cultural origins which he had suppressed as a child and diverted into his professional career. He became intensely involved in literary scholarship and Palestinian rights. He has been known to argue that intellectual romantics have distorted the West's view of the Middle East and Islamic world (Ahluwalia and Ashcroft 2). He also believes that the American view of Arabs is conditioned almost by a hostile media (Search Results). He was once a member of the Palestine National Council and a leader in the Palestinian cause (Search Results).
Here is a list of some of Edward's work taken from the website http://www.palestinemonitor.org/nueva_web/special_sections/edward_said/said_index.htm:
References:
Ashcroft, Bill and Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999.
Edward Said Speech www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barsaid/htm. 2 March 2001
Reviews of Edward Said's Works http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/said/bindex.html 17 April 2001
Search Results Biography.com, http://search/biography.com/print_record.pl?id+19146 2 March 2001
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/nueva_web/special_sections/edward_said/said_index.htm
Written by: Jessica Robinson
Edited by: Amy Landin