Professor Nichols teaches Writing 5.
William Nichols started teaching American literature and essay writing in the 1960s. Then he began to work with African American and Native American literature, as well as folklore. More recently, collaborating sometimes with biologists at Denison University and Vassar College, he has taught courses such as "Landscape and Culture," "The Environmental Imagination," "The Agricultural Imagination," and "Nature and Imagination." Now at Dartmouth he teaches a course on writing the personal essay called "Nature, Community, and Imagination."
In his published essays Nichols considers a range of subjects, including the portrayal of poverty in popular culture, the art of autobiography, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, African American literature, Native American oral tradition, the science-humanities debate, the mysteries of college partying, nuclear technology, torture, and the increasing use of isolation in our prisons. His books include Writing from Experience (1975), York’s Journal: A Novel (a story of the only slave to accompany Lewis and Clark, 2005), and Rambling Around Granville: Thinking Locally (2005). Nichols writes a weekly column of humor and cultural criticism for the Granville Sentinel in Ohio. He is at work on a novel about a Vietnam veteran who helps his son escape from a “supermax” prison in Ohio, "Ordinary Rendition."
