John E. Palmer 1913–2009

John James Ellis Palmer, the editor of the Sewanee Review from 1946 to 1952, died on Thursday, May 7, 2009, in Guilford, Connecticut, where he had lived in retirement. He was ninety-five years old.

Palmer was an energetic, resourceful, and accomplished editor of the Sewanee Review, a position in which he continued the literary emphases of his immediate predecessors, Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle. He sustained the Review's leading role in the southern literary renascence of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike Tate and Lytle, he wrote very little for publication himself. He brought to his task at Sewanee well-developed editing skills along with a remarkable ability to cultivate talented writers. Palmer also promoted "an international community of letters" by means of the Review, a goal he described in the first issue under his editorship in the fall of 1946. Among the contributors to the magazine during his years as editor were Howard Nemerov, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell, among the poets; William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, among the writers of fiction; and T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Malcolm Cowley, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, among the critics.

Palmer was a native of Arizona, Louisiana, where he was born on December 13, 1913. He was educated at Louisiana Polytechnic Institute (A.B. 1935), Louisiana State University, and Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar (B.Litt. 1940). He was involved in literary editing for almost his entire career: editorial associate at the Louisiana State University Press, 1935–37; managing editor of the Southern Review, 1940–42; editor of the Sewanee Review, 1946–52; and editor of the Yale Review, 1954–79. During World War ii he served in the U.S. Navy as commander of a mine sweeper, and during the Korean War he was recalled to active duty in the navy as an intelligence officer. He served as assistant naval attaché in the American Embassy in London in the early 1950s.

At Sewanee Palmer was a popular, gregarious, and stimulating member of the academic community. He helped to found a branch of the Beta Theta Pi social fraternity, becoming a charter member, together with ten students. His course on modern poetry was a stimulating and indispensable expression of the New Criticism. His relations with other members of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of the South were close. Despite inevitable differences of opinion and emphasis between some of his colleagues and himself, most of them rejoiced in his company. He brought a succession of literary friends to the campus. He moved under orders from the navy to Washington and continued to edit the Review. His house there was a mecca for students and faculty members from Sewanee, as well as for recent alumni. The same was true later for his house in London, after he had to give up editing the Review because of many other demands on his time.

Palmer became editor of the Yale Review when he returned to civilian life in 1954. His longtime friends Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were faculty members at Yale, where the English department was enjoying a new prominence. In New Haven Palmer not only edited the Yale Review but also served as dean of Silliman College, one of the university's residential colleges. From all reports he was a delightful companion to students and faculty members alike. He also participated in important civic activities as a member of the board of aldermen of New Haven, 1961–63, and of the board of directors of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, 1962–73. He assisted in selecting students for graduate scholarships to study in Britain as the secretary of the Connecticut Rhodes Scholar Selection Committee and as a member of the Henry Fellowship and Marshall Fellowship Selection Committees. After his retirement from the Yale Review and Silliman College in 1979, he was awarded the D.Litt. degree by the University of the South in 1981.

Palmer had a powerful and enduring effect on the republic of letters by his editing, teaching, and encouragement...