Paul Grimstad's writing has appeared in Bookforum, London Review of Books, New Republic, n+1, Times Literary Supplement, and other journals and magazines.

Recipient of the 2013 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book by Yale Junior Faculty

"Paul Grimstad's richly conceived study of literary pragmatism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry and William James...address[es] how, and by what authority, literature becomes other than simply a secondary reflection of preexisting experience or hard empirical fact. ... [An] intelligent and valuable approach...." --American Literature

"Rigorously argued, this erudite book is a search for the criteria by which literary work begins to mean. Whether he is asking how guessing and perceiving turn into valid judgments, or how the universal is embedded in the particular, Grimstad offers an exhilarating and insightful interpretation of thinking in Poe, Melville, Emerson, and Henry James, reorienting our presumptions concerning how experience fashions literary form." --Branka Arsic, author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson

"Vigorously tracing a range of texts-not just poems and novels but also private journals, personal correspondence, reviews, essays, anecdotes, and manuscripts--Grimstad shows how literary style both registers and extends an ongoing process of reflective 'experimentation.' The result is a book that deepens debates over pragmatism and literature and, more broadly, makes a valuable contribution to discussions of literature and philosophy." --Robert Chodat, author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

"This is a book that deserves to be widely read. It is smart, engaging, and ambitious, and not since Cavell has Emerson been discussed with such sophistication and insight. Grimstad even manages to make the vexed notion of 'experience' appear serious again. No scholar of American philosophy and literature can afford to ignore Experience and Experimental Writing." --John Gibson, co-editor of The Literary Wittgenstein

"A rare combination of conceptual breadth, sound scholarship, and inspired close reading, Grimstad's book boldly re-interprets the American literary and philosophical classics as an ongoing experiment in 'wording the world.'" --Joseph Urbas, Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, University of Bordeaux