Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont for more than thirty years. He is the author of books on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western Tradition, as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical music. He has also translated Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio for the Focus imprint of Hackett Publishing Company.

Simone's translation is simply superb. Of all the translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that is the most faithful to what's there in the Italian: no frills, no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings the line closer to iambic pentameter—just unadulterated Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly readable prose. —Peter Kalkavage, St. John's College