After writing books Literature and Film, The Rise of Modern Mythology (with Burton Feldman) and Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance, Robert D. Richardson turned to intellectual biography, spending ten years each on Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. He is working on a group biography set in eleventh century Persia and 19th century England centered on the poets of the Rubaiyyat, Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald.