Patrick Samway, S.J., today divides his time between Philadelphia, PA—where he is Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University and where he held the Donald MacLean, S.J., Jesuit Chair for two years—and Port au Prince, Haiti, where, St. Joseph’s is in partnership with the Jesuit order in a system of grammar schools, established by the Jesuits after the devastating earthquake.
He is author of Walker Percy: A Life (1997, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 1997 and was a main selection of the Catholic Book Club. He has edited A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (1995, University Press of Mississippi); and a volume of essays of Walker Percy entitled Signposts in a Strange Land (1991, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). With Ben Forkner he coedited four anthologies of Southern literature: A New Reader of the Old South (1990; Penguin); Stories of the Old South (1989, Penguin); A Modern Southern Reader (1986, Peachtree Press), and Stories of the Modern South (1978, Penguin).
With Michel Gresset he co-edited Faulkner and Idealism: Perspectives from Paris (1983, University Press of Mississippi) and A Gathering of Evidence: Essays on William Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” (2004, Saint Joseph’s University Press). He is the author of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust: A Critical Study of the Typescripts (1980, Whitston Publishers).
Father Samway, who recently gave the Flannery O’Cnnor Memorial Lecture at her old school, Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, GA, has just completed a book-length manuscript on Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux, the working title of which is: I Am Properly Back Where I Started From: Flannery O’Connor to Her Editor Robert Giroux.He also wrote Educating Darfur Refugees: A Jesuit’s Efforts in Chad (2008, University of Scranton Press). Father Samway, who received his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature twice at both the University of Nantes, France (1975-76) and the University of Paris VII, France (1979-80).
He has been a Bannan Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Santa Clara (l982-83); Visiting Associate Professor of English at Boston College (1983-84); Adjunct Associate Professor of English, Fordham University (Lincoln Center: 1984 to 1989); and Visiting Associate Professor of English, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana (Spring 1988). From 1984 to 1999, he served as Literary Editor of America, a weekly journal of opinion published in New York City by the Jesuits of North America.
For two years after that he was the Will and Ariel Durant Professor of Humanities at Saint Peter’s College, Jersey City, NJ before moving to St. Joseph’s University.