On the Road to Innsbruck and Back

William Bache's great-grandfather was a Methodist minister; his father owned two grocery stores and ten farms. He was born in the coal mining town of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, in 1922. Bill is now widowed and has one daughter. After getting a Ph.D. in English Literature from Penn State in 1952 and then teaching there for a year, Bill joined the Purdue English Department in 1953. Except for a summer in Maine and one in Montana and except for two sabbaticals in Oxford, Bill spent his entire career at Purdue. He has received a large number of teaching awards. Bill retired in 1992. Bill's specialties are Shakespeare and lyric poetry. He published Measure for Measure as Dialectical Art in 1969; Design and Closure in Shakespeare's Major Plays in 1992; Shakespeare's Deliberate Art in 1996. Since 1951, in addition to Shakespeare, Bill has published on Spenser, Jonson, Herbert, Harrick, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Housman, Conrad, Crane, Galsworthy, Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Bill is one of the founders of Modern Fiction Studies, and he has re-viewed seventy-two books of literary criticism. He has also published seven short stories and thirty poems.