Jo Ann Boydston: In Memoriam

The name of Jo Ann Boydston will be remembered as long as there is interest in studying John Dewey (or American pragmatism more broadly, for that matter) because she was the general editor of the great thirty-seven-volume edition of Dewey's works. (She also brought out several other related volumes, including a 1977 edition of Dewey's previously unidentified and unpublished poetry, an act of recovery that gave her particular pleasure.) The Collected Works, published between 1967 and 1990 by the Southern Illinois University Press, is one of the monuments of twentieth-century critical editing. Its origins go back to 1961, when Boydston and her associates at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIUC) began to assemble the material, and the formative years of the work occurred during an exciting period in the history of scholarly editing. The final volume of Fredson Bowers's edition of Thomas Dekker came out in 1961 and the first volume of his Hawthorne edition in 1962; in 1963 the Modern Language Association established the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA) to encourage and oversee several editorial projects that were in their early stages.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Boydston turned to Bowers, the leading textual scholar of literature in English, for advice. (She later wrote that she "had had an almost mystical, not to say religious, experience upon first reading Bowers".) He became the Consulting Textual Editor for the Dewey edition—and, in her words, "a wonderful mentor", providing "the big learning experience". In April 1966 he completed an essay on the Edition's textual principles and procedures, an essay that appeared with various revisions in seven of the volumes. A few glimpses of these years (including Boydston's complaint about the absence of women) were offered in her reminiscences, as elicited in a 2005 interview by Larry A. Hickman (her successor as director of the Dewey Center) and Michael Batinski (professor of history at SIUC) and published in part in the fourth volume of Dewey's Correspondence (2008).

Boydston's death on 25 January 2011 reduces the number of remaining links with the early days of a movement that resulted in an unprecedented concentration of new editions and of editorial debates. The place of her Dewey edition in editorial history goes beyond the fact that it is a model of what a scholarly edition should be—in its explanations of procedures and judgments, its lists of emendations and variants, and even its typographic design (for the volumes are convenient to hold and read). It was the first application of the so-called Greg-Bowers rationale to a twentieth-century figure, and it was a pioneering edition of a philosopher, demonstrating that the attitude toward critical editing developed in connection with literary study provides a valuable approach for other kinds of writing as well. (Not until 1975 did Bowers's edition of William James and Peter H. Nidditch's of John Locke begin publication.) The CEAA was fortunate in having the Dewey edition to proclaim its breadth of purview in its earliest years. Boydston's influence, however, was not limited to the Dewey edition. The extent to which she had thought through the whole editorial enterprise was shown in numerous talks and essays, the best known perhaps being her 1989 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), entitled "In Praise of Apparatus". An apparatus of variants, she said, presents "a story of suspense and discovery, a true textual drama". She obviously understood that every stage of a text's history is of interest (a point much observed in recent years).

Jo Ann (Harrison) Boydston was born on 2 July 1924 in Poteau, Oklahoma, and always took pride in her Choctaw background. She received a B.A. (summa cum laude, 1944) and an M.A. (1947) from Oklahoma State University (with a year of teaching Spanish and French at Eastern Oklahoma Community College in between). On 8 May 1943, she married Donald N. Boydston, a native of Forth Worth, who was a fellow OSU student but was at that time stationed at the Quantico Marine Base in...