Edmund Leroy "Mike" Keeley (February 5, 1928 – February 23, 2022) was an American novelist, translator, and essayist, a poet, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. He was a noted expert on the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos, and on post-Second World War Greek history.

Life and career

Keeley was born in Damascus, Syria, on February 5, 1928, the son of the American diplomat James Hugh Keeley, Jr. and Mathilde (Vossler) Keeley, a homemaker. His brother was the diplomat Robert V. Keeley. He spent his childhood in Canada, Greece, and Washington, D.C., before earning his BA from Princeton University in 1949. In 1952 he received a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Oxford University where he studied with a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Keeley served twice as president of the Modern Greek Studies Association from 1970 to 1973 and 1980 to 1982, and as president of PEN American Center from 1992 to 1994. He retired from a long career of teaching English, creative writing, and Hellenic studies at Princeton University in 1994. His fiction and non-fiction are often set in Greece, where he spent part of each year, but also in Europe and the Balkans, where he has frequently traveled, and in Thailand and Washington, D.C.. He lived with his wife Mary Stathato-Kyris (married in 1951) in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1954 until her death in 2012. Keeley died from complications of a blood clot at his home in Princeton, New Jersey on February 23, 2022, at the age of 94.

Awards

Books

Editor and translator