Robert Archambeau at The Hudson Review:
He constructed something else to go along with his literary life, too: he created a persona, what we might almost call a carapace. In an academic career that took him on what he called “many years of pilgrimage over the academic map,” from Smith to Bard to Rochester to Georgetown, he adopted the dress and mannerisms of an English gentleman, perhaps in response to what he called the “covert anti-semitism” in some of the departments in which he taught. Beginning his career at a time when creative writers were still viewed with some suspicion by their more conventionally trained colleagues, Hecht compensated by becoming what Yezzi calls “the very model of a modern literature professor: bearded, tweedy, pensive, reserved.” Hecht gravitated to teaching Shakespeare more than creative writing. While his love of Shakespeare was deep-seated, it was also an important part of this process of self-creation. “Nothing could be more canonical” than Shakespeare, Yezzi writes, nothing “more revered and accepted on both intellectual and aesthetic grounds.”
more here.