His parents, Harry Sheinfeld and Rose Youlis Sheinfeld, emigrated from Bessarabia. He received his B.A.and M.A. in English at Wayne State University, and then completed his Ph.D. studies in English at the School of Letters at Indiana University. In 1956 he began teaching as an instructor in English at Purdue University. Overthe years he waspromoted to full professor, retiring in 1991 as Professor Emeritus. During his 35 years at Purdue, he specialized in American literature and wrote or edited ten books and about 200 articles or reviews. With Joyce Field he edited two books on Bernard Malamud and produced five books on Thomas Wolfe. He devoted much of his scholarly and critical work to 19th and 20th Century American fiction and to modern Jewish-American writers such as Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth and I.B. Singer. On the departmental level he received recognition for excellence in teaching. He also received grants for scholarly/critical work in France and Israel. In 1969-1970 he was a Senior Lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He was an advisory editor to the following journals: Modern Fiction Studies, Thomas Wolfe Review, Yiddish, Modern Jewish Literature, Studies in Jewish-American Literature and Shofar. For 1958-1959, he was Agricultural Experiment Station Editor at Purdue. He was active in m a n academic and/or Jewish and Zionist organizations: American Professorsfor Peace in the Middle East, Modern Language Association, and others.