EDWARD W. SAID was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He died in 2003 in New York City.
He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into 35 languages, including
Orientalism (1978);
The Question of Palestine (1979);
Covering Islam (1980);
The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983);
Culture and Imperialism (1993);
Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process (1996); and
Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). Besides his academic work, he wrote a twice-monthly column for
Al-Hayat and
Al-Ahram; was a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and was the music critic for
The Nation.