Memorial for Everett H. Emerson, 1925-2002

On July 9, 2002, Everett Emerson died of congestive heart failure at his home in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was 77. He was Alumni Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1983 until his retirement in 1993. The Everett Emerson Distinguished Faculty Chair in the Humanities was named in his honor at Chapel Hill. For many years, he was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he also edited the scholarly journal Early American Literature and taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in American literature from its beginnings through the nineteenth century. He was beloved by his many students because his interest in them persisted well into their postgraduate lives. Of the 15 dissertations he directed at Amherst, for example, 11 are now books. Born on 16 February 1925, he was educated at Harvard University and took his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University. He taught at Florida Presbyterian College before coming to U Mass in 1964. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II in the Pacific Theater. Passionate lovers of classical music, Everett and his wife, Katherine, spent many summers at their home in Lenox and were season subscribers to the Tangle wood Festival where they were often joined by their Amherst friends for concerts. At the University of Massachusetts, Emerson was the first director of the University Honors Program and initiated the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, in addition to his teaching, journal editing, and prolific publication of scholarly books. Among these are English Puritanism from John Hooper to John Milton, American Puritanism, John Cotton, and two very recent works that reflect the quality and range of his intellect, The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens, and Mark Twain: A Literary Life. He was especially proud of the Twain studies, which both received extremely high praise from the academic community and Twain scholars.

Everett Emerson is survived by his wife, Katherine, of Chapel Hill and Lenox, Mass., and by his son, Stephen, of San Francisco. He is also mourned and survived by countless numbers of graduate and undergraduate students and faculty colleagues who were fortunate to share classrooms or the profession with so learned and compassionate a teacher. We have all benefited from his work and mentoring, and the world of American literature will not be the same without him. He was recently designated the Honored Scholar of Early American Literature by the current editors of the journal he commenced in 1968. The citation reads that "Everett Emerson created the sense that early American studies was a discipline and a scholarly pursuit." He will be much missed by all of those who knew and learned from him.