ITHACA, N.Y. -- Daniel Mendelsohn, an author, journalist and professor of classics at Princeton University, is winner of the 2001-02 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The $10,000 prize, administered by the Cornell University Department of English, is one of the most generous and distinguished in the American theater. Mendelsohn was selected by a committee consisting of the chairs of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities, assisted by experts on the theater from those universities.

Mendelsohn received the award based on three in-depth articles he authored for The New York Review of Books .

In its citation, the Nathan award committee stated: "… Mendelsohn writes with elegance, erudition and humor about plays ancient and modern on the contemporary stage. Clearly a scholar, he brings to his analysis of Greek tragedy and the plays of Noel Coward an admirable knowledge of the times and places which produced them. But his scholarship is always in the service of a very contemporary and well-articulated sense of why and how these plays might speak to us in the present. Mendelsohn's deep engagement with these dramatic texts, their histories and the ways in which they continue to be reimagined serves to remind us how theater has mattered and of why it matters still."

Mendelsohn received his B.A. in classics from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in classics from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon fellow in the humanities. After completing his doctorate in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Esquire , The Hudson Review and The Paris Review . From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism in 2001; he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books , for which he writes reviews of books, film and the theater. His book reviews also appear regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review , and he writes frequently about travel for Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine. Mendelsohn's 1999 memoir of sexual identity and family history, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000), was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and his scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays , was published last month by Oxford University Press. His current projects include a book about Archimedes, for the "Science Lives" series published by W. W. Norton; a new translation of the complete works of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, to be published by Knopf in 2003; and a book-length expansion of his July 2002 cover story for the New York Times Magazine , "Before the Holocaust Fades Away." He lives in New York City and outside of Princeton, N.J.

Past recipients of the Nathan Award have included Walter Kerr (1963) and Mel Gussow (1978) of The New York Times , Albert Williams of the Chicago Reader , Kevin Kelly (1992) of the Boston Globe and Alisa Solomon (1998) of The Village Voice .