Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College. The author or editor of ten books, his most recent book is a critical biography of the poet-artist Ted Joans, Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans. Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans’s vast body of unpublished and previously-unseen work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Joans’s life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.

Other recent books have focused on rethinking the significance of the writers associated with the Beat literary movement: Belletto’s The Beats: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a major reassessment of the Beat movement, and was named a 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has also edited two volumes pertaining to the Beats in the Cambridge Companion series: The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (Cambridge, 2017), a new introduction to Beat literature; and The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (Cambridge, 2024), both of which bring together some of today’s best scholars writing about the Beats and Jack Kerouac.

Beyond his work concerning the Beats specifically, Belletto’s scholarship has helped to reframe how we understand post-World War II literature and culture, with particular emphasis on Cold War literature and culture. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (Oxford UP, 2012), argues that chance became a conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, and shows how a range of writers innovated strategies for dealing with chance in their work. More recently, he co-edited Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (Iowa, 2019), a collection of essays that investigate the global Cold War through the framework of neocolonialism. He has also co-edited a collection of essays on Cold War literature and culture titled American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (Iowa, 2012), and is currently editing a new volume on global Cold War literature.

Belletto further explored mid-century American literature by editing American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (Cambridge, 2018), a volume that challenges staid conceptions of that decade’s literature (and for which he wrote the chapter on “African American Literature”). His essays concerning post-war literature and culture, on topics as varied as “Korean War literature,” “alternative civil rights literatures,” “the game theory narrative,” antifascist aesthetics, the relationship between Beat writers and India’s Hungry Generation, and Tuli Kupferberg’s 1960s magazine Yeah, have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including American Literature, American Quarterly, ELH, Twentieth-Century Literature, Criticism, Clio, American Studies, Genre, Humanities, and Nabokov Studies. He is also a frequent contributor to academic book collections, and has recently published chapters on subjects ranging from Bob Dylan, teaching Beat little magazines, the uses of measure in mid-century poetics, Kerouac’s Buddhist-inspired ideas of fictional non-fiction, and the early work of poet Harold Norse.

At Lafayette College, Belletto teaches courses that explore U.S. literatures and cultures during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to introductory courses in English, he regularly offers courses that mix canonical with under-studied texts and figures on a range of topics, including American fiction in a transnational context; Cold War literature and culture; histories of the American novel; aesthetics; the Beats; and contemporary fiction.

He is an editor for the journal Contemporary Literature and co-editor of the Beat Studies Book Series at Clemson University Press.