About the Author

Shahrokh Meskoob was an Iranian writer and intellectual, who was born in Babol, on the Caspian coast, in 1924 and died in Paris in 2005 at the age of eighty-one. Imprisoned in Iran for three years in the mid 1950s for leftist activities, he was forced to leave the country following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, after publishing two articles in the Ayandegan newspaper in Tehran that criticized the new regime.
Meskoob authored seventeen books, including seminal works on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Moghaddame-i bar Rostam o Esfandiyar (1963) and Sūg-e Siavash (1971). Three of his works have been translated into English, Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language (1992), and posthumously, In the Alley of the Friend: On the Poetry of Hafez (2018), and The Ant’s Gift: A Study of the Shahnameh (2021). His translations into Persian include Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1949) and five Greek tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles (1956-1973). Surveys of his literary output include Shahrokh Meskoob: A Commemorative, an Iran Nameh Special Issue (2006), and A Scholar for Our Times: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Shahrokh Meskoob (2022), Stanford Iranian Studies series.