Ben Downing (born April 17, 1967) is an American writer, editor, and teacher. Specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British social life and literature (with a particular emphasis on travel writing), he has written essays, articles, and reviews on figures such as
Robert Louis Stevenson,[1]Duff Cooper,[2]Robert Byron,[3]Anthony Powell,[4]Peter Fleming,[5]Wilfred Thesiger,[6] and
Patrick Leigh Fermor.[7] His biography of
Janet Ross, who for many years was the doyenne of Florence’s Anglo-American colony, was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.[8]
Since 1993 Downing has worked at Parnassus: Poetry in Review, of which he is currently the co-editor.[12] He has taught literary seminars and workshops at
Columbia,[8]Bryn Mawr,[13] and the
92nd St. Y,[14] and he currently teaches a small private class, known as The English Salon, for advanced non-native speakers of English. He lives in New York City and graduated from
Harvard University.[15]
Works
Books
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), biography