My Everett Emerson

Over the years I learned that my first meeting with Everett Emerson was characteristic of his generosity, and thus, I suspect, of many readers' experiences with him. It was at the MLA convention in 1978, where Charles Scruggs and I shared the Norman Foerster Prize for the previous year. I was still a youngster in the profession and awed by the whole scene, and particularly by people who edited journals like the strikingly yellow-covered Early American Literature, which every few months I eagerly awaited in the stacks of my university's library.

Right after the presentation Everett introduced himself and told me that he had been one of the judges, and that my piece on Thoreau was one of the best things on that author he had read in years. Immediately putting me at ease, he asked if I wanted to meet Gay Wilson Allen, who had received the Hubbell Medal. Of course I did! And then Everett invited me to a party in his suite where, he explained, I would meet many early Americanists. He was not exaggerating, and a few weeks before MLA every year after that, I received a photocopied invitation to this legendary reception hosted by the then already longtime editor of Early American Literature and his gracious wife, Katherine. The gathering became a highlight of my professional life, where I met such legendary scholars as Karl Keller, Norman Grabo, and David Levin, to name only those who, like Everett, now have passed from their labors.

Everett thrived on such meetings and occasions, for he tirelessly devoted himself to the work of building and nurturing a community of scholars who had early American literature at its center. Whether it was hosting his MLA party, attending other professional meetings where he would scout for essays for EAL, or writing a detailed critique of someone's submission to the journal, he always strove to make one feel as though he or she were part of a larger enterprise, one to which all contributors, young or old, should feel connected. He was like a queen bee around a hive, happiest when his workers were building the edifice over which he exercised a regal, and well-deserved, prerogative.

Everett, of course, was present at the very creation of our field, at those meetings in the mid-1960s that eventuated in the founding of this journal in 1966. And for 20 years he did everything he could to assure its success, financially and intellectually. Although he was not its very first editor, he quickly assumed that position, and convinced the University of Massachusetts to give it a home. When he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he did the same, bringing the journal to what always had been one of the centers for the study of American literature, where Norman Foerster himself, as well as Richard Harter Fogle, Lewis Leary, Louis Rubin, and others had taught. In 1986, when a position in early American literature opened at that institution, Everett led the way in recruitment, for he made it clear to candidates that the person chosen would likely become his successor. That I was the one who finally gained the position was a dream come true. Among other things it made possible was the privilege of daily work with Everett, both in my transition to the editorship and as his junior colleague.

Many readers will recall the conference "Prospects," held at Chapel Hill in 1989, in part to mark Everett's retirement from the editorship that he had held for 20 years. Cosponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture, by all accounts it was a signal moment in the maturation of early American literature as a field of study, assembling as it did scholars from a wide range of disciplines. The conference was, I think, Everett's crowning success, the testament to what he had built. In a sense, "Prospects," and thus he, made possible what we now have in the Society of Early Americanists, that most vibrant of interdisciplinary organizations.

I would not do full justice to my memory of Everett, though...