Theodore Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956) is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam. Bawer's writings on literature, gay issues and Islam have been seen as both controversial and affirming. While championing such authors as William Keepers Maxwell Jr., Flannery O'Connor, and Guy Davenport, he has criticized such authors as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow. A member of the New Formalists, a group of poets who promoted the use of traditional forms, he has assailed such poets as Allen Ginsberg for what he views as their lack of polish and technique. Bawer was one of the first gay activists to seriously propose same-sex marriage, especially in his book A Place at the Table (1993). While Europe Slept (2006) was one of the first to skeptically examine the rise of Islam(ism) and Sharia in the Western world, and The Victims' Revolution (2012) was an early criticism of academic identity studies. Although he has been described as a conservative, by some, Bawer has often argued that such labels are misleading or reductionist. He has explained his views as follows: "Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrender one after the other and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny." Early life and education Bawer is of Polish descent through his father and is of English, Welsh, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and French descent through his mother, whom he profiled in the September 2017 issue of Commentary. Born and raised in New York City, Bawer attended New York City public schools and Stony Brook University, where he studied literature under the poet Louis Simpson, among others. As a graduate student, he taught undergraduate courses in literature and composition. He earned a B.A. in English from Stony Brook in 1978, followed by an M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1983, both also in English. While in graduate school, he published essays in such academic journals as Notes on Modern American Literature and the Wallace Stevens Journal, and opinion pieces in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. His dissertation, "The Middle Generation", was about the poets Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell,