Welcome! I’m Charlie. I’m a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center. Previously, I was a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows.

My essays, criticism, and reported features have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, The Yale Review, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, Commonweal, The Hedgehog Review, Public Books, The Point, and elsewhere, and my work has been translated into multiple languages.

I am at work on two books. My academic monograph The Art of Idleness: The Questioning of Work in Modern Literature, tracing the rehabilitation of idleness (the willed rejection of labor) in literature from the late nineteenth century forward, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Workmaxxing: How Productivity Eclipsed Pleasure, under contract with Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, investigates the historical roots of the contemporary work ethic; it also sets forth alternatives, constructing a positive philosophy of leisure foregrounding virtues and capabilities that the work ethic leaves out or suppresses.

I am represented by Lucy Cleland at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

I grew up in North Carolina and am the youngest member (by two minutes) of a set of fraternal triplets.

Please get in touch! You can email me at charlie.sam.tyson@gmail.com. I also tweet, sporadically, @CharlieTyson1.