Bruce Fleming won an O. Henry Award for his first published story, "The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein" (1991) and in 2005, the Antioch Review Award for Distinguished Prose, a career award. His experimental novel Twilley (1997) was compared by critics to works by Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Proust, Thoreau, and David Lynch. He has published a book of dance essays, Sex, Art and Audience (2000); a memoir, Journey to the Middle of the Forest (2008); many scholarly and theoretical books; and articles and essays in literary quarterlies and publications such as the Village Voice, The Washington Post, and The Nation. His philosophical works include Art and Argument: What Words Can't Do and What They Can (2003), Sexual Ethics (2004), and Science and the Self (2004) and Disappointment, or The Light of Common Day (2006). These culminated in The New Tractatus: Summing Up Everything (2007). Other recent books include Annapolis Autumn: Life, Death and Literature at the U.S. Naval Academy (2005) and Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash (2006). His academic degrees, from Haverford College, The University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University, are in philosophy and comparative literature. He is an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, where he has taught literature for more than twenty years.