Born there, he came to us from Horace Mann School. At Princeton, he was in the Special Program in the Humanities in English, was chairman of the Nassau Lit, and won a number of University academic awards. He took his meals at Wilson Lodge.
Following Princeton, Paul earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Columbia. Described in his New York Times obituary as a “a poet, writer, prankster, and professor,” he taught for 55 years in the English department at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. He published a long list of learned books and articles on such wide-ranging subjects as vampirism, evil, the birth of modern thought, guilt, and Till Eulenspiegel, as well as biographies of Peter Paul Rubens and Niccolo Machiavelli. A Fulbright fellow, he was an expert in medieval literature and fluent in seven languages. Over the years he also taught at the Sorbonne, Hunter, University College London, and Osnabrück University.
Paul is survived by his wife, Assia Nakova; daughters Julie and Rebecca from his first marriage; two granddaughters; and a sister and a brother.