1940s Overview
For the English department, as for the nation, the defining event of the 1940s was the war. Students, as well as faculty and staff, were called to active duty. A total of 9,508 served in the military forces; 249 died. And from 1942 to 1945, the campus was mobilized to serve the war effort—in particular through the Air Cadet Training Program, the Army Specialists Training Program, and the Civil Affairs Training School at the University of Pittsburgh (known as CATSUP). The English department provided courses in writing, public speaking, and literature. Those from the English department who saw active duty included Charles Crow, Robert X. Graham, W.D. Harrison, Buell Whitehill and George Crouch.
When asked to comment on the role of the English department during the war years, Frederick Mayer, the department’s new chair, responded that the English department was pleased to do its duty, to be “in the war.” The teachers in the department, he said, “believe, with passion, that their subject is practical in peace and in war; and when we say ‘practical,’ we mean useful to every man in his work for wages and in his happiness as a human being.”
By the end of the war, the University had provided training to a little over 7,000 members of the armed services. And now the university was suddenly flooded with GIs pursing a degree through the GI Bill. For the academic year 1947-48, there were 25,700 students enrolled, a substantial increase over the previous years, and 13,268 were veterans. The university struggled to find classroom and dormitory space; the department struggled to find faculty.
There were, however, significant moments in the history of the English department unrelated to World War II. Perhaps the most significant were the resignations of both Chancellor Bowman and the English department Chair, Percival Hunt. There was no immediate connection between these two resignations, but Hunt’s career had been closely aligned with Bowman’s from the time they both arrived in the early 1920s.
By the end of the 1930s, the Bowman administration was surrounded with controversy. Bowman had always opposed a code of tenure on the Pitt campus. He had expelled the student leaders of the Liberal Club. He dismissed a very popular and politically progressive Associate Professor of History, Ralph Turner. Many felt that this was due to Turner’s progressive politics (and his criticism of the Mellons). By the end of the decade of the 1930s, Bowman’s actions were being investigated by the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives, by the Board of Trustees, who had formed a faculty/board committee, and by the AAUP, who put Pitt on their blacklist. Bowman stayed on as Chancellor through the difficult war years and then, in February 1945, he asked the Board of Trustees to accept his resignation, effective July 1. The Board accepted his resignation and he was succeeded by the Provost, Rufus Henry Fitzgerald.
Percival Hunt stepped down as department chair in 1941 and he retired in 1948. Hunt had been the public face of the English department since the 1920s. In the 1940s, Edwin L. (Pete) Peterson had assumed this role. In the early 40s, Pitt students began to dominate the three major national literary contests, contests sponsored by Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and Story Magazine. Peterson was identified with this success. In 1939 Peterson had begun a workshop-like course, around the same time that Iowa began to be known for its “Writer’s Workshop.” By the end of the decade, the department would announce a new Writing Major, perhaps the first in the country. In the late 1940s, the department began to hire writers as well as scholars—that is, colleagues distinguished by their records as poets or novelists: George Abbe, Lawrence Lee and, as a Visiting Professor, Storm Jameson. All of this received both local and national attention.
The other defining event was the loss of the Speech Division and its faculty when, in 1949, the division was granted independent departmental status and Buell Whitehill became the Speech Department’s new chair. Whitehill had created an ambitious and successful program in theater, theater arts, public speaking and debate, and the Speech division of the English department was drawing substantial numbers of students and producing successful PhDs. In the 1940s, Whitehill turned the curriculum toward the new media of radio and cinema, with film as the focus. By the end of the decade, the Division sponsored courses in film history, film analysis, and film production. Here, too, the English department was leading the country in the ways it was redefining the range and scope of English studies. In 1949, however, the Speech division went off on its own. English lost colleagues and courses that focused on media, debate and performance. Hunt had always insisted that “reading and writing” defined the core mission of the department. Reading, by the end of the decade, had become primarily the formal study of literature, and writing was represented more and more by the work of poets and fiction writers, “creative” writers, and the value of writing was measured in terms of national critical reception.
Perhaps the best way to end this overview of the 1940s is with a photograph from the 1949 Conference for Writers. This was the 4th annual conference designed to bring together faculty and students from the colleges and universities of Western Pennsylvania. The 1949 conference featured Cleanth Brooks, listed as “one of America’s most important contemporary critics,” Warren Beck, an award winning fiction writer and Professor at the Bread Loaf School, Storm Jameson, the well-known British novelist and past President of the British section of Penn, and Norman Corwin, who wrote, produced and directed radio dramas for CBS. The event featured workshops for student writers and it celebrated the remarkable success of Pittsburgh students in national writing competitions: 6 awards in the 1947-48 Atlantic Contest for College Students and 6 awards in the 1948-49 Atlantic contest, including a first prize in the short-story division to Montgomery M. Culver, Jr, for his story “Black Water Blues.”
1940s Courses
The curriculum in the English department changed dramatically in the 1940s. In 1949, Speech (including theater, radio and film) broke from English and became an independent department. Its program is described in detail in an announcement in the alumni magazine, “The New Department of Speech.” And, in 1946, the English department created a new major area of undergraduate study, the Writing Major. The programs in Literature and Composition remained similar to what they had been in the 1930s.
Speech and Theater: In the 1930s, the department’s division of Speech had an active and distinguished program in public speaking, debate and theater, and it drew large numbers of students. The enrollment demands and the range of course offerings were cited as reasons for departmental status. But it was also the case that the faculty clusters in the English department seemed to be moving in different directions. Those teaching in the Speech division were more politically progressive, and Chancellor Bowman had made the campus a difficult and unfriendly place for those on the left. And the department had been divided for many years between those who taught or studied language as text and those who taught or studied language as performance. These areas of teaching and research no longer seemed to be compatible.
By the mid-1940s, courses in speech, debate and theater began to be listed separately in the college catalog from the English offerings, although the Speech Division was still, the catalog said, administered by the English department. By the end of the decade, Speech became an independent department, a department whose mission and curriculum was strongly marked by the vision and commitments of its first chair, Buell Whitehill.
Whitehill had developed a very successful program in theater. In the 1940s, he added courses in the new media of performance— “Radio,” “Writing for the Radio,” “The Motion Picture,” “Types of the Motion Picture,” and “Film Production.” He added additional courses to serve the program in theater arts: “Playwriting,” “History of the Theater,” and “Modern Theater.” (In the early 1950s, he would develop ties with WQED to create courses in television.) Speech would be the department on campus to teach, study and promote the new media. Playwriting and script writing, courses that had been a part of the English curriculum, went to Speech.
Speech would also develop a track in speech pathology and this development began in the 40s. In 1947 Jack Matthews was hired as a Professor of Psychology and Speech. He joined the new department to develop a speech clinic and courses in “speech correction.” Matthews would become a future chair of the Speech department, and an important figure both in his field and in the College.
Writing: In 1946, the department created a new “Writing Major.” Here is the original announcement:
The English department offers, in addition to its usual major in English, a special major in writing. This is an integrated program of courses in composition (journalism, fiction, advertising, radio, verse, and article) and in literature and criticism that trains students to take advantage of the opportunities in writing now open to young men and young women.
From the core courses (still referred to as composition courses), students would learn the “special skills of writing”:
how to get a character from one room to another, how to edit a news story for accuracy of statement, how in a magazine article to make a fresh and true approach—how, in short, to put down in words whatever emphasis and interest an experience has for the writer.
Central to the major, however, was the belief that,
to be successful, a writer must know more than the skills and techniques of his craft. It is equally important that he have something to say, that he be informed in as many fields of human interest as possible.
And so the program relied on faculty advisers who would direct students not only toward courses in literature but to courses in other department, “in fine arts or history or biology—in any of the social and the natural sciences.”
In establishing a Writing Major, the department was also making a commitment to bringing distinguished writers to campus to give lectures, to meet with small group of students, and to discuss student manuscripts. One way this was accomplished was through an annual conference (begun in the 1930s by Edwin Peterson) bringing writers, critics and editors to campus to discuss contemporary writing, publishing, editing, and the teaching of writing. The department would also sponsor a magazine of student writing, MSS (Manuscripts: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh)” And, following the success of Peterson’s students in national competitions, the Atlantic Monthly promised a four year scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh for the winner of their annual writing contest for high school students. It was a grand beginning.
The Journalism program also continued to attract students. The basic courses—reporting, editing, feature writing, editorial writing—were supplemented in the 40s by courses in magazine writing and editing, courses in “pictorial” journalism, and a course in writing the “Advanced Article.” This was defined as a “conference course,” a workshop most likely, that had students working with a member of the writing faculty and a faculty member from another department. Students, then, were writing explanatory articles on topics that required an outside expert as a reader and mentor.
Literature: Emily Irvine’s course, “Child Literature,” was renamed “Literature for Children.” The department introduced a course in “European Backgrounds for English Literature.” George Crouch, with sponsorship from the Nationality Room committee, created what was designed to be an annual series of lectures on “World Literatures.”
The PhD program continued to center on literary study. The numbers remain about the same (20 PhDs granted in the 1930s and 22 in the 1940s), although the student body was more diverse, and there was a less predictable range of dissertation topics, including dissertations on American journalism, on biography, and on race. Here are some titles: “A Study of the Writings of an American Magazinist, J.T. Trowbridge,” “Aspects of Southwestern Regionalism in the Prose Works of Mary Austin,” “John Forster: Critic,” “Development of the Negro Press, 1827-1948,” and “Attitudes Toward the Negro as an Expression of English Romanticism.”
In 1947, the graduates formed a Graduate English Study Club whose goal was to provide a schedule of meetings where graduate students, faculty and visitors would present papers and lead discussions. Thomas Berry, a PhD graduate, came back to campus from West Chester State Teachers College to lead a discussion of Katherine Mansfield. Professor Boyd from Psychology spoke on Freud. Graduate students spoke on “20th Century Criticism of Hawthorne,” “The Esoteric in Modern Poetry,” and “Metaphor.” Preston Schoyer, a Pittsburgh author, spoke on “China as a Source of Literary Material.” The final event of the year was a presentation by Norman Foerster.
Composition: It is important to note that the Writing Major grew out of the concerns, the energies, and the faculty identified with composition in the English department. Percival Hunt and now Edwin (“Pete”) Peterson were the central figures. Hunt continued to teach advanced writing courses, including a course in “the sketch and the longer narrative,” and he introduced a course in “Verse Writing.” Peterson had instituted what came to be called “conference courses,” workshops where writers met to discuss their work, and these continued to produce nationally recognized, prize-winning student short stories. In the 1930s the English department, with George Crouch at the lead, created courses for students in Engineering, Business, and the technical professions. Courses in professional and technical writing continue to be offered. They (and the expertise they represent) became central to Army Training Programs during the war years.
1940s Faculty
Percival Hunt: Professor and Chair. Hunt stepped down as department chair in 1941 to become “Professor at Large,” and he retired in 1948, although he maintained his office on the 33rd floor of the Cathedral and continued to meet with students and colleagues. His contributions to the department and to the university were celebrated at his retirement and the celebration included a tribute volume, a collection of essays by colleagues and students, If By Your Art: Testament to Percival Hunt, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1948. Chancellor Bowman also presented him with a silver medallion and in the presentation he said:
Percival Hunt, for twenty-six years you have taught young men and women at the University of Pittsburgh. You have taught them many things—to see with their eyes, to feel with their hearts, to think clearly and justly; and you have shown them the beauty and the strength that words have when they speak honestly of such things. Scholar and poet as well as teacher, you have made literature a vital influence on this campus. In your classes students have felt the power of Shakespeare, the humanity of Chaucer, the warmth of Keats; you have led students to appreciate the permanent values in literature. And many of these young people, under your guidance, have begun successful writing careers of their own.
There is an account of this occasion in the alumni magazine and it includes editorials written in Hunt’s honor for the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hunt published very little during his career. He took pride in saying that his teaching did not allow him the time to write books. After he retired, he published four: Samuel Pepys in the Diary (Pittsburgh UP, 1958), Fifteenth Century England (Pittsburgh UP, 1962), The Gift of the Unicorn: Essays on Writing (Pittsburgh UP, 1965) and To What Green Altar (privately published, 1969). Hunt died in 1968.
Frederick Philip Mayer was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1945. After Hunt stepped down, the senior members of the department petitioned the Dean to run the department by an executive committee who would choose its own chair with short rotation. From the documents, it appears that the department was concerned to find its leadership from the current faculty rather than invite the administration to search outside. This plan lasted through the end of the decade. Frederick Mayer was the first Chair of the departmental committee. He served until 1948, when he was replaced by Putnam Fennell Jones.
Mayer prepared two long reports, one in 1941 on “The Department of English in the College: An Interpretation of Its Aims and Work,” and the other, in 1944, on “What the Department of English has Learned from its War Program.” Both were reproduced in the alumni magazine and include many interesting photographs. Both strike a very different tone than was present in Hunt’s accounts of the English department and its mission.
In his report, Mayer said:
That the elegant belles-lettres education of the nineties is gone is merely to say just that. We cannot kick against the pricks; we are fools to try. This world is our world. Those who scorn the English teacher as an elegant, outmoded curio should make us think. If we are right, we dare not fret, fume, sulk, swoon. It is our work to make others find in English what we have found. We must be practical; if they need it we must show them.
Later, in a section subtitled “Vocational English Versus Poetry,” he says, “Much of the work of the English department must be practical, tool material, service to the University in many ways, like English for pharmacy students, for engineers, for teachers.” He notes that Speech is “expanding to near program size under the impetus given from outside as well as from inside.” And he concludes by saying,
Today, everybody studies English, one kind or another. This may be for our good, or it may be that subdividing everything for the instruction of everybody has made it harder for us to preserve that quality of clear thinking, precise expression of the judicious which used to be a sign of the gentleman.
Margaret Storm Jameson was hired as a Visiting Professor for the 1947-48 academic year. Born in England in 1897, Jameson was a well-known novelist, journalist, dramatist, critic, essayist, and activist. She had published 45 books when she joined our faculty as a visiting professor. The best known, perhaps, was Women Against Men (1933). Her hiring was part of a move to bring established writers to campus and to the English department faculty. Although she taught only briefly at Pitt, she created strong ties with the department. In her memoir, Journey from the North, she describes the pleasure she took in being in Pittsburgh. Jameson was President of the English Centre of International PEN from 1938-1944, during which time she assisted intellectuals in their flight from Nazi-occupied countries. For her efforts, her name was placed on a Nazi arrest list. Her political advocacy and writing, particularly pertaining to exiled writers and thinkers, continued throughout her career. She died in 1986.
Putnam Fennell Jones: Jones was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1947, the same year he became Chair of the departmental committee, a position he would hold until the end of the decade. In the 1940s, Jones was teaching courses in the English Language, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer and he was writing regular abstracts for Classical Weekly.
Walter Lawrence Myers: Professor. Myers served as a lieutenant in a machine gun platoon during WW1. In 1943, as the campus was training soldiers for the second world war, Myers wrote an essay for the alumni magazine on “The Arts in Time of War—and Afterwards.” He asked what the arts might come to mean for soldiers now in the “fact-cramming phase of wartime education.” He acknowledged that art can be an expression of the differences between nation and nation and wondered about its power to unify. Surely, he says, “the nations, by arts strongly their own yet mutually appreciated, can be urged through the whole wide world toward life as an art.”
John Kemerer Miller: Professor. Miller retired in 1947 and died in 1949.
Harold William Schoenberger: Professor. Schoenberger was the department’s principle Americanist; he was teaching survey courses, courses in American fiction, poetry and drama, and an advanced seminar in American literature.
George Carver: Professor. Carver died in 1949. He taught composition and courses on the essay and on biography. His last book, Alms for Oblivion: Books, Men and Biography (1945) was a study of 23 British and American biographers and traces the history of the genre.
Charles Arnold: After many years as an Assistant Professor, Arnold was promoted to Associate rank in 1940 and Professor in 1945. He retired in 1949. He spent his career teaching and promoting journalism on our campus.
Ford Elmore Curtis. Curtis was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1949-50. In this decade, he was teaching courses in drama—Modern Drama, English Drama, 16th Century British Dramatic Literature.
Ralph Hartman Ware: Ware was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1948. Ware was the junior Americanist and listed after Schoenberger on many of the American literature courses. He also taught English Drama and courses in the lower division.
Lawrence Lee (BS, Virginia; MA, Harvard) was hired in 1949 as an Associate Professor. Lee was the second faculty member to be hired on the basis of his credentials as a writer of fiction and poetry. (The first was George Abbe, listed below.) Lee had served as the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1938-42, and he wrote for a variety of academic journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Lyric, The Virginia Spectator, and The Classical World. At the time of his hiring, he was best known for his books of poems: Summer Goes On (Scribners, 1933) and two books on the life of Thomas Jefferson: Monticello and Other Poems (Scribner’s, 1937) and The Tomb of Thomas Jefferson (Scribner’s, 1940).
Donald W. Lee was hired at the rank of Associate Professor in 1948. At the time of his hire, he was on the editorial staff of G&C Merriam, where he worked on Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Lee had taught at Duke, Penn State, Pennsylvania Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy. He was the author of Functional Changes in Early English (1948), which had been his PhD thesis at Columbia. He was hired to teach courses in English Language, Old English, and Beowulf.
Max Molyneux (BA Oberlin; PhD Cornell) Molyneux was hired in 1947 as an Associate Professor. He was part of a long line of Cornell PhDs to come to Pittsburgh. Molyneux had served as the head of the English departments at Bethany College and at Superior (Wisconsin) State Teachers College. He studied early modern English literature. His edition of James Cleland’s Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607) was published by the Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints Series in 1948. He taught courses in the English renaissance, Milton and “European Backgrounds of English Literature.”
Edwin L. Peterson was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor Prof in 1944. His essay, “The Parmachene Bell,” was published in Esquire in 1940. (A “parmachene bell” is a wet fly used in fly fishing.) The essay was reprinted in Esquire’s Second Sports Reader (1946) and in Fishing’s Best Stories (Paul D. Staudohar, ed; Chicago Review Press, 2000), a collection that also includes stories by Stephen King and E. Annie Proulx. Peterson’s book-length, lyrical account of fishing the rivers of Western Pennsylvania, No Life So Happy, was published by Dodd, Mead in 1940.
Peterson was much in the news, both locally and nationally, for the success of his students in national writing competitions and for his initiatives on campus—both the new course, “Conference in Writing,” which brought the workshop to our curriculum, and the annual summer conference that brought writers and editors to campus to talk about the state of American writing and to meet with students to discuss their work. In the 1945 yearbook, the OWL, Peterson had a spot in the “Faculty Hall of Fame.” The students wrote of him:
Ruddy-cheeked and tweedy, “Pete” injects life into his English classes by his tongue-in-cheek flickers of humor. We’d recognize that fine, clear voice anywhere, whether it’s rolling through the slow-cadenced lines of his favorite Christina Rossetti or crackling through the commons room microphone at the traditional Christmas party. That’s the time, incidentally, when, whiskered and padded, Pete becomes our own Pitt Santa Claus. In his spare time Mr. Peterson tries his hand at practicing the same writing principles that he teaches to his students; his short stories have been published in national magazines, while his full length, idyllic No Life So Happy glows about the delights of fishing. We place him in an especially favored nook because we admire his complete honesty and his enthusiasm for life that brims over to lend meaning to his lectures and warmth to his dealing with students.
Buell B. Whitehill, Jr. was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1949. He was on leave during the war years, and in 1946 he received an Army Commendation Ribbon for his service in the mid-Pacific in the Historical Office of the US Army Medical Department. In his time on campus, Whitehill dramatically expanded the range of courses in the Division of Speech. He continued to lead the Pitt Players and to build an ambitious curriculum in performance and theater arts. In 1948, he introduced the first film course to the English department curriculum, “The Motion Picture,” and this was followed by courses in film analysis, film history and film production. He also introduced courses in radio and writing for the radio. His students worked with the facilities at KDKA and his contacts with WQED prepared the way for students to study television in the 1950s. When, in 1949, the Speech Division of the English department became an independent, free-standing department of Speech, he was chosen as chair. At this point, the new Speech department added additional courses in speech pathology and speech correction. With Peterson, Whitewill was the major shaping presence in the English department in the 1940s. In 1953 Whitehill left the university to become Personnel Director for Rust Engineering Company.
Agnes Lynch Starrett: Starrett was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1944. In the 1940s, Starrett was very much involved in student and alumni publications, including the OWL and the English department literary magazine, MSS. And she was teaching writing.
W. George Crouch was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1944. He was leading the efforts to develop courses in business and technical writing, including courses for the evening school. In this sense, he was part of the movement toward practical uses of English that Mayer mentions in his review of the English department. During the war, Crouch was part of the group that developed the War Department’s American University in Shrivenham, England. Crouch, who was born in London, wrote a long essay for Pitt, the alumni magazine, on the experience of the Shrivenham group during the war. Crouch served as faculty adviser to the College Association.
William Don Harrison: Associate Professor. The last mention we can find for Harrison is in the academic year, 1941-42.
Ellen Mary Geyer: Associate Professor. Geyer was the first woman hired to the tenure track in the English department. She taught composition and teacher training courses in conjunction with the School of Education. She retired in 1949, after 25 years of teaching, and she died in 1953. In 1940, she wrote a piece for Pitt the alumni magazine on the Scottish Classroom.
Henry Clayton Fisher (BA, Pittsburgh 1928; MA Pittsburgh 1930; PhD Pittsburgh 1938) was appointed as an Assistant Professor in 1938 and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1948. He taught courses in Shakespeare, History of Criticism and Principles of Criticism. In 1946, he wrote an essay on “A Scholar’s Library” for the alumni magazine.
Robert X. Graham had been teaching as an Instructor and directing the program in Journalism. He was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1946 and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1949.
Charles Crow (BA, Pittsburgh 1930; MA Pittsburgh 1931; PhD Pittsburgh 1948). Crow had been teaching in the department as a graduate assistant or Instructor since 1931. He was on military leave from 1942-46, and then, in 1947, he was hired as an Assistant Professor. Crow will have a long and distinguished career in the English department.
George Abbe was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1947, the first faculty colleague to be hired because of his credentials as a writer of fiction and poetry. After taking a BA at the University of New Hampshire, Abbe did graduate work at the University of Iowa where he was either part of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop or part of what would become the Writer’s Workshop. At the time of his hire, Abbe was the author of four novels: Voices in the Square (1938), Dreamer’s Clay (1940), They Also Fight (1944). Mr. Quill’s Crusade was forthcoming. Abbe had also published two volumes of poetry, Wait for These Things (1940) and Letter Home (1944), and poems and short stories in places like the Atlantic Monthly, Yale Review, Southern Review and Rocky Mountain Review. He was clearly a young writer on the rise. In announcing the hire, Putnam Jones (now the Chair of the Department Committee) said that Abbe would “assist Professor Edwin L. Peterson in the department’s creative writing program, specializing in fiction writing courses.”
Abbe lasted only a year. His letters to the local newspapers provoked a feature article in The Pittsburgh Press with the title, “Pitt Faculty Member Preaches Gospel Dear to the Hearts of Commies.” Putnam Jones told Abbe he was concerned that the notoriety he had achieved was not likely to “increase esteem” for the department or the university. He assured Abbe that the institution would honor his three year contract but suggested that he might look elsewhere for work. Abbe left the next Fall (1948) for Poland to gather material for a book. He did not return to Pittsburgh. He continued to publish books of poetry until his death in 1989. He taught at Mount Holyoke, Yale, the University of Connecticut, Wayne State, Columbia, the University of Maine, Springfield College, Central Connecticut State College, Russell Sage College, and the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
Emily Hall Duffus (BA, Pittsburgh 1927; MA, Pittsburgh 1929). Duffus had been teaching as a graduate assistant or Instructor since the late 1920s. She was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1945. The next year she left for California. Duffus taught composition and a freshman orientation course sponsored by the Dean of Women.
Emily Gertrude Irvine (MA, Pittsburgh 1928) Irvine had been teaching for several years as an Instructor. She was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1944. She taught courses in writing and journalism as well as the course in children’s literature. In the 1940s, she began to review the children’s books of Marie McSwigan, a former Pitt student, for the alumni magazine.
Maurice Harry Weil was hired as Assistant Professor in 1944 after teaching for many years as an Instructor.
Instructors/Lecturers
In the decade of the 1940s, when the University turned its resources to the war effort and then braced to receive GIs on the GI Bill, there were dramatic fluctuations in the size of the non-tenure-track faculty. In 1940, there were 17 faculty members outside the tenure track (Instructors and Lecturers). In 1945, there were 10. Beginning in the Fall of 1947, the numbers began to grow dramatically, with 58 faculty members outside the tenure track in 1949.
There was substantial turnover among the NTT faculty, so we will only list those who taught for 5 or more years. The list is still very long.
Marcus T. Allias
William C. Baker
George Denton Beal
Hannah Bechtel
Flora Bramson
Victoria Corey, teaching courses in radio
Ruth L. Cramblet
Jane E. Ewing
Dorothea B. Gardner
Zeva B. Haible
Kenneth E. Harris
Gladys Price Howe
Carolyn La Rue
Abe Laufe (Laufe will become an Assistant Professor in the 50s.)
Elizabeth R. McIntosh
Thomas McIntosh (47-48 only)
Dorothy Miller (Miller will become an Assistant Professor in the 50s, working in English Education.)
Helen-Jean Moore
Dorothy O’Connor
William B. Pritchard
Vivian M. Rand
Diantha W. Riddle
Julius S. Rosenson
Harry M. Schwalb
Lois C. Shuette
Helen T. Simons
Richard C. Snyder (Snyder will become an Assistant Professor in the 50s.)
Bebe Spanos
Clare V. Starrett
Betty Ann Stroup
George Yost
Robert Zetler
1940s Students
At the 1949 Writer’s Conference, the department celebrated graduate and undergraduate students who had won national writing awards, awards sponsored by the Altantic Monthly or Scholastic Magazine. In most cases, these prize-winning essays and stories were written for classes taught by Emily Irvine or Edwin Peterson. This list of winning students included:
Montgomery M. Culver, Jr.: Monty Culver would later join the English department faculty and serve as Director of the Writing Program.
Bernard Fischman: Fischman left Pittsburgh to work as a free-lance copywriter in New York, where he also wrote plays that were produced off Broadway and a novella, The Man Who Rode His 10-Speed Bicycle to the Moon (1979).
Myron Kopelman: Kopelman is fondly remembered by generations of Steelers’ fans as Myron Cope. Cope wrote for the Pitt News, where he also served as Sports Editor. After graduation, he wrote briefly for the Erie Times but then returned to Pittsburgh to write for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and for the University News Service. He had a distinguished career as a free-lance journalist, writing for Sports Illustrated and other magazines. In 1963, he received the E.P. Dutton Prize for “Best Magazine Sports Writing” for a profile of Cassius Clay. He joined the Pittsburgh Steelers broadcast team in 1970. Cope was the author of four books: Off My Chest (1964, with Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns), Broken Cigars (1968), The Game That Was: The Early Days of Pro Football (1970), and an autobiography, Myron Cope: Double Yoi! (2002).
William D. Morrissey: Morrissey worked in advertising for Smith, Taylor and Jenkins, a Pittsburgh advertising firm, and later served as an account manager for Landow Advertising Agency.
Tere Ríos: Maria Teresa Ríos Versace (1917-1999) was a special student in the English department after the war and published frequently in MSS, the department’s literary magazine. Ríos was born in NY and identified closely with her Puerto Rican ancestry. She was a devout Catholic. She served in the war as a truck driver and civil air patrol pilot. She wrote for Stars and Stripes and later as a stringer for Gannett. She was the author of three novels: An Angel Grows Up (1957), Brother Angel (1963), and The Fifteenth Pelican (1966). The Fifteenth Pelican provided the inspiration for the TV series, The Flying Nun.
Edward W. Speth: Speth did graduate work in Psychology and was director of the Counselling Center, Willamette University.
Dexter E. Robinson: Robinson was president of World Publishing Company in Cleveland, Ohio; then vice-president of Isaac Auerbach in Philadelphia, Pa., computer specialists; then with John Diebold in New York City; and, finally, executive vice-president of Access Corporation in Cincinnati.
Other BA and MA students include:
Fairy Harsh Clutter (MA 1942) went on to teach at the State Teachers College, Indiana PA.
Adele Dolokhov (MA 1947) was, with Morton Fine, co-winner of the 1946 Doubleday award for the most promising student of writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She later published a short story, “Small Miracle” in Today’s Woman that was selected by Martha Foley for Best American Short Stories (1949).
Morton Fine (MA 1947) was also co-winner of the 1946 Doubleday award for the most promising student of writing at the university. He was part of the group doing radio work in the department. After taking his degree, Fine moved to California where he wrote for the radio and where he met David Friedkin, with whom he had a long and successful collaboration. Together, they wrote several nationally broadcast radio shows, including Crime Classics, and then went on to write for film and television. Fine’s movie credits include The Pawnbroker, I Spy, and The Most Deadly Game. His TV credits include The Rifleman, Maverick, and The Virginian.
Milton P. Foster (MA 1947) became chair of the English department at Eastern Michigan University. He edited Voltaire’s Candide and the Critics.
William F. Grayburn (BA 1948) completed his PhD at Penn State and had a career in the English department at Indiana University of PA.
Joseph L. Grucci (MA 1948). During the war, Grucci was part of the University of Pittsburgh group assigned to teach at the American University in Shrivenham. Grucci joined the faculty at Penn State in 1949 as an instructor in English composition. In 1950 he was promoted to Assistant Professor and then to Associate rank in 1956. Although Grucci was listed as a teacher of composition at Penn State, he established his national reputation as a poet, editor, and translator, and he was active in supporting poetry on the Penn State campus. He founded the poetry magazine, Pivot. He was one of the first to translate the poetry of Pablo Neruda (in Three Spanish-American Poets, 1942). He was the author of This Autumn Surely (1935), Tiny Hawks: Poems and Translations (1955), and The Invented Will (1962). After his retirement in 1974, an endowment created Penn State’s Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Center. The Penn State English department also sponsors a Grucci fellowship and a Joseph L. Grucci “work in progress” reading series for graduate students.
James R. Hayes (BA 1949), a student of Edwin Peterson, wrote for the Pittsburgh Press and for a variety of regional and national magazines, including Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Pennsylvania Angler. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association and served on its Board of Directors.
Dorothy M. Hill (M.A. 1948) taught honors courses in English at Peabody High School's Center for Advanced Studies. She was the author of four curriculum guides for high school teachers published by the Center for Learning: Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), 1988; A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen), 1989; Frankenstein (Mary Shelly), 1991; and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), 1996.
Patricia Hodgkinson (BA 1946) later joined the faculty of Wilson College.
Despoina (“Bebe”) Spanos Ikaris (BA 1943, MA 1947) was one of the first women in the US to receive a Fulbright Scholarship. Spanos earned her PhD at the University of London and had a long career in the English department at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York. She published a children’s book, The Red Jacket, in 2008 and a translation of Anatoli by Sossa Berni Plakidas in 2010.
Arlene Jack (BA 1947?) won first prize in a 1945 script writing contest sponsored by KDKA. The script was prepared for an English department course in Radio Writing. She later wrote for KDKA’s ”School of the Air.”
Elaine Kahn (BA 1944) wrote for the Pitt News and went on to a career as a journalist. She wrote an article on the Pitt football team for the Winter 1941-42 issue of Pitt, the alumni magazine, that included a profile of Bill Benghouser, a 215 pound tackle and an English major who could “write like an angel.”
Lee McInerney (BA 1947) was an award-winning reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
[photo]
Harry M. Schwalb (BA 1947) took graduate courses and served as a lecturer in the department. Schwalb wrote often for the alumni magazine. He was an accomplished artist and became the dean of Pittsburgh art critics, writing regularly for Pittsburgh Magazine. Pittsburgh Magazine gives an “Excellence in the Arts Award” in Schwalb’s name.
Gerald Stern (BA 1947) was not an English major—he majored in Political Science with the thought of becoming a lawyer. In the 1940s, the English department was full of prose and, as a poet, Stern was (as he would insist) largely self-taught. Still, we include him on our list of students for the influence and inspiration he brought to generations of English majors who followed (including Jack Gilbert, BA 1954) and in the belief that the attitudes toward language promoted by the department were part of his general education. Stern talks about this period of his life in a three part video profile, Still Burning, prepared by the Poetry Foundation.
Stern grew up in Pittsburgh. His parents, Harry and Ida Barach Stern, were Eastern European Jews who emigrated to the US. In an interview reported in Poetry Archive, he said,
I went to the University of Pittsburgh, but I didn't even know as a boy where the university was. I discovered it literally by accident. I saw some people lined up on the lawn outside the university registering for courses, and it was the War, and anybody could get into college. And I decided, 'Hey, I'll take classes!' And I became a college student. No one ever advised me. No one at home ever talked to me about college.
[Gerald Stern]
While a student, Stern served with the Army Air Corps. After graduation, he went to Columbia where he received his MA (1949). He spent a year in Europe, mostly in Paris, and returned to begin work toward a PhD at Columbia, but he soon abandoned the program and taught in high schools, both public and private, and universities—including Temple, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Somerset Country College. Although Stern was always writing poetry, he began to find success in the 1960s. In 1971, he published his first collection, The Piney’s.
And this began a career of remarkable authority, importance, and influence. His 1977 book, Lucky Life, was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American poets and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Red Coal (1981) received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of American; This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998) won the National Book Award; Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Bread Without Sugar (1992) won the Paterson Poetry Prize; American Sonnets (2002) was shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Poetry Prize; and his Early Collected Poems (2010) received the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.
Stern was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American poets in 2006, and he served as the poet laureate of New Jersey from 2000-2002. He has a long list of honors and awards from leading journals and foundations, including the Ruth Lily Prize, a National Jewish Book Award, a Wallace Stevens Award, a Guggenheim, and two NEA Fellowships. Later in his career, Stern taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and at Drew University. He is well known and much loved by readers of contemporary American poetry. For an introduction to Stern and his work, we are providing links to a PBS interview with Jeffrey Brown and a podcast from the Poetry Foundation series, Essential American Poets.
June Wallace Thomson (BA 1945) served as editor of the Pitt News and as the assistant editor of the yearbook, the Owl, and was a member of Xylon, the honorary journalism fraternity. In 1947, the alumni magazine announced that she had sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post for $1200. She went on to work in advertising in New York.
PhD Graduates (with dissertation titles)
[Richard Earl Amacher] Richard Earl Amacher (PhD 1947; diss: “The Literary Reputation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1882-1945”). Amacher taught at Carnegie Tech, at Yale, at Rutgers, at Henderson State Teachers College and then at Auburn from 1957-1984, where he served as the Hargis Professor of American literature. Amacher was twice appointed a Fulbright Professorship, once at the University of Wurtzburg and once at the University of Konstanz. His books include: American Political Writers, 1588-1800 (Twayne, 1979); Benjamin Franklin (Twayne, 1962), Edward Albee (Twayne, 1969), and Franklin’s Wit and Folly: the Bagatelles (Rutgers UP, 1953). He served as a co-editor of The Flush Times of California (U of Georgia P, 1966) and New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism (Princeton UP, 1979).
George Denton Beal, Jr. (PhD 1949; diss: “Modern Theories of the Metaphorical Mode of Expression”). Beal was hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown campus.
[Thomas Elliott Berry] Thomas Elliott Berry (PhD 1949; diss: “A History of the Recent Translations of the American Novel into Spanish”). Berry went on to a long career at West Chester State Teacher’s College, where he established and directed the graduate program in English. His books include: Journalism in America (1958), The Most Common Mistakes in English Usage (1961), Values in American Culture (1966), The Biographer’s Craft (1967), The Study of Language: An Introduction (1970), and The Craft of Writing (1974).
James Albert Binney (PhD 1946; diss: “A Study of the Prose and Editorial Work of Josiah Gilbert Holland”). Binney went on to a long career at West Chester State Teachers College.
Samuel Cornelius (PhD 1949; diss: “The Sea as the Core of Conrad”). Cornelius taught in the Department of English at Alma College, where he served as Department Head and Dean of Humanities.
Charles Rohrer Crow, Jr. (PhD 1948; “The Rhythmic Organization of Emerson’s Four-Stress Verse”). Charles Crow joined the Pitt faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1947. He had a long and distinguished career at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lewis Henry Fenderson (PhD 1948; diss: “Development of the Negro Press, 1827-1948”). Fenderson, who also received his BA and MA at Pitt, came to the PhD program after working as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1949, Fenderson joined the faculty at Howard University, where he helped to establish Howard’s program in Journalism. Fenderson taught at Howard for 34 years. He had success as a poet, song writer, and playwright, winning the James Weldon Johnson Poetry Prize and a Washington Star Literary grant. He was the author of Thurgood Marshall: Fighter for Justice (1969) and the editor of Black Man in the U.S. and the Promise of America (1970), with Lettie J. Austin and Sophia P. Nelson, and Many Shades of Black, with Stanton L. Wormley (1969).
William Homer Ford (PhD 1942; diss: “Problems of Lincoln Biography”).
William Wayne Griffith (PhD 1941; diss: “ A study of the Writings of An American Magazinist, J.T. Trowbridge”). Griffith taught at Mary Washington College.
James Welfred Holmes (PhD 1945; diss: “Whittier’s Prose on Reforms Other Than Abolition”). Holmes served as Professor of English at Morgan State University.
James Oliver Hopson (PhD 1948; diss: “Attitudes toward the Negro as an Expression of English Romanticism”). We believe that Hopson taught at Talladega College and was involved with the Talladega Little Theater.
William Castle Hummel (PhD 1946; diss: “Williams Hazlitt’s Political Theories”). Hummel taught in the 1950s as Professor of English at Kansas State College.
Elizabeth Johnston (PhD 1947; diss: “John Forster: Critic”).
James Allison Lowrie (PhD 1943; “A History of the Pittsburgh Stage, 1861-1891”).
Muriel Hope McClanahan (PhD 1940; diss: “Aspects of Southwestern Regionalism in the Prose Work of Mary Austin”).
Mary Alice Reilly (PhD 1944; “Sir Max Beerbohm: Satirist”). Reilly served as an Instructor at Rhode Island State College.
[Charles Doren Tharp] Charles Doren Tharp (PhD 1940; diss: “The Frontier in the Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier”). Tharp served as Dean of Liberal Arts, Dean of Administration, and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Miami. He served as the president of the Florida Association of Colleges and Universities from 1953-54.
[Cecil V. Wicker] Cecil V. Wicker (PhD 1940; diss: “The Romantic Melancholy of Edward Young: A Study of Its Cause and Influence”). Wicker joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico in 1927. He left New Mexico to complete his PhD at Pitt, then returned to UNM in 1942 and taught there until his retirement in 1960. He wrote on Steinbeck, and he published The American Technical Writer with his UNM colleague, William P Albrecht.
Theressa Byra Wilson (PhD 1943; diss: “Victorian Biography”).
John Negley Yarnall (PhD 1941; diss: “Romance a la Mode, 1896-1906”). From 1939-1962, Yarnall taught at Wilson College, Chamberburg, PA, where he was Professor and department chair. From 1962 until his retirement in 1978, he was chair of the English department at Montgomery College, Maryland. After his retirement, he taught part time at American University in Washington, DC.
[Robert Lewis Zetler] Robert Lewis Zetler (PhD 1944; diss: “Life and Works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu”). Zetler taught at Chatham College from 1945 to 1960, reaching the rank of Professor, and then at the University of South Florida where he was Director of the Division of Language and Literature, 1960-1973. He contributed to journals in education and engineering. He published several books on technical writing, including some with his Pittsburgh professor, George Crouch: Guide to Technical Writing (1948, 3rd edition 1964, with George Crouch), Chemistry in General Education (1950), Effective Bank Letters (1951), Advanced Writing (1952), Successful Communication in Business and Industry (1960), and Successful Communication in Business and Industry (1961, with George Crouch).
1940s Footnotes
Student Writing
In the 1940s Edwin Peterson created an annual collection of student writing. In the first year it was titled, Student Writing, but after it was titled MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. A reviewer in College English said that MSS contained “some of the finest university writing we have seen in a long time.”
The first issue was dedicated to Percival Hunt:
He taught us much about writing and reading, even more about thinking, feeling, living. More than any other person, it was he who created the interest which the department of English has in good student writing. The department of English, for that reason and for many others, wishes to dedicate this first number of Student Writing to Professor Percival Hunt.
He will know that the writing is not professional and that it does not pretend to be. It is the work of students, some of them his students, and some of them his students’ students. They are freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduates writing sincerely of their own experience. Perhaps, sometime, a few of these students will become professional writers. Should that time come, we hope they will remember what they are learning here at the University and what Professor Hunt, these many years, has taught—to write always sincerely and always honestly of the things that matter.
E.L. Peterson
Below is a selection of entries:
“Autobahn Stop,” by William Grayburn
“Five Veterans Remember,” Charles Fischer, Horace Umberger, Michael A. De Marco, Morton Fine, William Grayburn
“Part of Home,” by Patricia Hodgkinson
“The Windy Sky for Breath,” by David Craig (a 1948 Doubleday Award winner)
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,” by Harry M. Schwalb
“The Besieged,” by Tere Ríos (a 1948 Doubleday Award winner)
“Los Carilargos,” by Tere Ríos (published in Prairie Schooner)
“Conversation Piece,” by Edward Speth
“Four Veterans Remember,” Dexter E. Robinson, Paul Morgan, Harry W. Elwood, John Morrissey
“Science and the Eighteenth Century Poet,” by George F. Schindler
Raymond Howes, the Low Point at Pitt, and Ronald Reagan
In his history of the university, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987, Robert Alberts gives a chapter to the final years of Chancellor Bowman’s administration, “The Ordeal of the Chancellor.” In it, he alludes to Raymond Howes,
a disaffected instructor in the English department in the middle 1920s [who] wrote as late as 1972 that Bowman’s problem “was the extent to which [he] was willing to bow to what he thought were the desires of the Pittsburgh industrialists."
Howes’ story provides an interesting view into the department, the institution, and the tensions on campus in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
Howes was one of many to come to Pitt from Cornell. He arrived as a graduate student in 1924, soon after completing his BA, to join the Speech division in the English department. He completed his MA two years later, in 1926. In his two years in the department, Howes taught speech and he coached both the men’s and women’s debate teams. He studied with Wayland Parrish and Hoyt H. Hudson, both Cornell PhDs. Hudson was his MA thesis advisor. Hudson would leave in 1927 for Princeton; Parrish would leave in 1936 for Illinois. Both men left for good jobs in fine departments, but there is also evidence that they were discouraged by the political climate in Pittsburgh. According to Howes, Percival Hunt, the department chair, said to him one day in the hallway, “You Cornellians worry me. You always speak right out.”
In 1929, Howes published “Sweetness and Light in Pittsburgh” (Outlook) and, in 1930 he published “A Poet in a Cathedral” (The American Mercury). Both essays were critical of Chancellor Bowman and make the argument that to finance something so grand as a Cathedral of Learning, Bowman had to court the Mellons and the power-brokers at the Duquesne Club. As a consequence, he had to sacrifice the fundamental ideals of an academic community, including tenure and academic freedom.
Howes had an argument to make about how progressive thought was silenced on the Pitt campus in the 1920s and 30s, and he was certainly not alone in making it. Howes, however, wrote about Bowman and his ambitious vision for the university with sympathy and care. Bowman remains an enigma for Howes; he is not a caricature. The essays are worth reading.
But the story doesn’t end there. In 1972, Howes reprinted the two essays as a pamphlet, Low Point at Pitt, with a brief introduction, “My Two Years at Pitt,” and he circulated the pamphlet as an attempt to forestall then California Governor, Ronald Reagan’s attempts to cut the budget of the University of California.
Governor Reagan is merely a convenient symbol for a widespread phenomenon. Domineering governors, who think they represent the best interests of the taxpayers, are not the only menace. Undue influence may be exerted by any source of major amounts of financial support—individual donors, groups of donors, organizations, foundations, or Federal agencies. It may even come, as in New Hampshire, from an extremist newspaper. The results are always the same—distortions of the institution’s academic program and impairment of its ability to pursue true educational goals.
In 1926 Howes left Pittsburgh for Washington University. In 1941 he was teaching Engineering Journalism off the tenure track at Cornell. In 1960 he became the editor of The Educational Record, a publication of the American Council on Education. In 1962, he served as the Assistant to the Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside. He edited a number of volumes for the ACE. He was the author of Debating (D.C. Heath, 1931), Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments with a Critical Introduction, with Richard W. Armour (Cornell, 1940), and the editor of Historical Studies of Rhetoric and Rhetoricians (Cornell, 1961).
Credits
The photo of Cecil Wicker was graciously provided by The University of New Mexico Archives Faculty Files Collection, University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research.