Bert Bender is an Emeritus Professor of American literature at Arizona State University, where he taught from 1971 through 2003. He defined and pioneered two new fields of study in American literary history and the history of science. His first book, Sea-Brothers: the Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (U of Pennsylvania, 1988), described and analyzed a body of fiction that literary historians believed did not exist, in the mistaken assumption that American sea fiction ended with Moby-Dick and the age of sail, when the cowboy supposedly displaced the sailor as an essential American character.
Bender’s two other scholarly books created new fields of study in literary history and the history of science. They were widely reviewed not only in literary journals, but also in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences; Journal of the History of Biology; and The British Journal for the History of Science, They showed for the first time that Darwin’s theory of evolution exerted a far greater influence on American fiction than was previously known, and why it did. The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871- 1926 (U of Penn, 1996) recasts American literary realism, showing that it arose in response to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and his related theory of emotions and the evolutionary mind, key elements of Darwinism that literary historians and historians of science had never considered. Bender’s third book, Evolution and “the Sex Problem”: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism (Kent State UP, 2004), traces the ways in which naturalist and modernist novelists founded their narratives on various conflicting interpretations of Darwinian and anti-Darwinian evolutionary thought, including not only Darwin's theory of sexual selection, but also his theory of the evolution of racial difference; the rise of the eugenics movement in the 1920s, Bergson's Creative Evolution, and the emergence of Freudian psychology from its roots in Darwin’s analysis of the human mind and emotions. Together, The Descent of Love and Evolution and “the Sex Problem” present important new interpretations of major works by twenty-four American novelists, including William Dean Howells, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
Bender’s fourth book, Catching the Ebb: Drift-fishing for a Life in Cook Inlet (Oregon State UP, 2008) is a memoir with ecological and literary dimensions, recounting his parallel career of thirty years as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.