Leon Howard, English: Los Angeles
|
1903-1982
|
|
|
Professor Emeritus
|
Leon
Howard was born on November 8, 1903 in Talladega, Alabama and died of
complications resulting from emphysema on December 21, 1982. His wife,
Henrietta, preceded him in death, dying in 1977. He is survived by their three
children: Mr. Charles Howard of Los Gatos, Mrs. Kathleen Piper of Chico, and
Mrs. Mary Cresswell of Wellington, New Zealand.
Leon
received his A.B. degree from Birmingham-Southern College in 1923, his M.A.
from the University of Chicago in 1926, and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins
University in 1929. He taught at Pomona College (1930-37) and Northwestern
University (1938-50), before joining the faculty at UCLA where he taught from
1950 to his retirement in 1971. He then taught one course a semester at the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque until his death.
Leon was a
preeminent professor of American literature, establishing an international
reputation with books such as The Connecticut Wits (1941), Herman
Melville A Biography (1951, reprinted 1958, 1967), Victorian
Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Career of James Russell Lowell (1952), Literature
and the Tradition (1960), and “The Mind” of Jonathan Edwards:
Reconstructed Text (1963). Leon did more than probably any other American
scholar in helping to carry American culture abroad. His many pamphlets and
essays were widely distributed in both Europe and Asia, and he held Fulbright
and other appointments at Tokyo and Kyoto Universities (1951, 1954); the
University of London (1956-57); Nice (1957); Copenhagen, Lund, Stockholm, and
Upsala (1960); he also gave a series of Fulbright-sponsored public lectures in
Europe (1961), Australia (1963), and Switzerland and Germany (1964). His
achievement was recognized by honorary degrees from the University of Chicago
(1961) and Abo Akademi, Finland (1968). Leon was a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963), a Guggenheim Fellow (1944-45), and the
recipient of the UCLA Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (1964).
― 133 ―
A somewhat
shaggy, rumpled sociable man with an infectious laugh, Leon had a shrewd sense
of how the academic profession worked and what were its strengths and
weaknesses. Fiercely loyal to his students, his many Ph.D.s were as well
trained in the working of the academy as they were in their field of study. A
man of formidable energy, Leon is remembered by his students as walking into
his classes without a note and lecturing brilliantly for an hour or longer on
Emerson, Melville, or Whitman, often chain-smoking as he talked, emptying the
ashes into a lidded ashtray that he always carried in his pocket. In his 21
years at UCLA, he directed more than 30 dissertations, some written by the now
leading scholars in the field. At the annual meeting of the Modern Language
Association, Leon would literally “hold court” in his hotel room to which
ex-students, old colleagues and friends, and some of the most eminent scholars
from around the world would come for a friendly drink, good talk, and the
exchange of professional information and academic news. These meetings
characterized Leon at his very best--warm, friendly, open, totally committed to
what was going on in his field, and interested in how the profession was
responding to that activity. As one of his junior colleagues once put it, “I
learned more about literature and the profession from Leon's `tea parties' than
I ever did from a book. Leon had a way of making scholarship and scholarly
activity fun.” It was this gregariousness that made him equally at home in the
cabin he and some of his colleagues leased at Lone Pine, which became a kind of
extension of UCLA, and indeed came into its own press and published a number of
his less serious essays and poems under the imprint of the University of
California Press at Lone Pine.
Leon's
accolades are many. Harrison Hayford has summarized his scholarship, teaching,
and service on national and international committees as “amounting to academic
statesmanship”; Norman Holmes Pearson referred to him as “the leading scholar
in the field of American literature”; and Dean Robert E. Streeter wrote: “when
George Beadle was inaugurated as President of the University of Chicago in
1961, the faculty was asked to designate eight scholars to receive honorary
degrees on that occasion. Of the eight, two were humanistic scholars. Professor
Howard was one of these.” Leon Howard was a giant in his field. As one scholar
recently put it, “he embodied a way of studying and talking about American
literature that led to major critical advances and which has seemed to have
passed with him.”
Richard Lehan
No comments:
Post a Comment