Lake Walden at Penn State

Dan Walden has spent over half a century as a distinguished professor at Penn State University, teaching English majors how to read works of literature. Thousands of students, many of them now senior citizens, learned about life, and ultimately became better human beings, by having read novels under Dan's tutelage.

As English professors go, especially for those who specialize in Jewish-American and African-American literature, Dan Walden's legend as a man of letters, and his track record in molding young minds, is unassailable. He is no less towering a figure than that other Nittany Lion legend, Joe Paterno, college football's winningest coach, who died earlier this year and who, in the last months of his life and with his football program tarnished by scandal, seemed much farther away from his glory days than Dan Walden.

It is one of those happy coincidences, emanating from Penn State's own Happy Valley mythology, that I have been asked to write about Dan Walden and contribute to this Festschrift issue of the SAJL only a few short months after I wrote for the Daily Beast about the far less sanguine subject of alleged acts of child abuse that occurred under Joe Paterno's watch.

Two lions of Penn State ended their careers at approximately the same time, but with radically different public receptions. Dan Walden was being honored by his friends, colleagues, and former students with a most fitting tribute to his long career as a teacher, writer, and editor. The very journal that he founded and edited for decades was devoting an entire issue to him, appropriately putting words on paper as a symbolic reminder of his contribution to Jewish literature. Walden was the dean of Jewish-American literary scholars, after all, an unofficial title, in the vernacular of academia, no less estimable than being college's all-time winningest coach. And perhaps even more impressively, scholars and writers continue to regard him fondly, which is no small achievement in the academy, where petty jealousies and rivalries compete on their own gridiron, one that Walden somehow managed to elude for half a century without injury.

Around the same time as this Festschrift was being assembled, however, Penn State's Board of Trustees summarily fired Joe Paterno as head football coach, in midseason, no less, a mere two months before lung cancer would claim his life.

Triumphant and tragic parallel tales of two men who inhabited the same campus, during the same time period, and who left behind truly indelible legacies. What other connections can be made between them? What else could they have possibly had in common?

One was an Italian-American, the other Jewish-American. Paterno was a jock at Brown, where he played quarterback on the football team but also majored in English in the classroom. Walden attended graduate school at Columbia and NYU but while in New York City dabbled as a song-and-dance man off Broadway. Paterno shared the Brown school record for most interceptions; Walden may have actually ended up with the fancier footwork.

It was most assuredly not only at their respective retirements where Penn State first took notice of these men. A bronze seven-foot statue of Paterno, depicting him with his finger raised in the air, has stood guard outside Beaver Stadium since 2001. Not long thereafter the English Department at Penn State honored Dan Walden with a conference room dedicated in his name.

I know something about that conference room. I was asked by the university to speak at the naming ceremony and inform all those who attended (as if they needed any reminders) why Walden was so deserving of this honor, what made him so special, in what ways his name was celebrated beyond the misty hills of Happy Valley. I was, to some extent, the logical choice to deliver these words. For one thing, I was no stranger to the university. Dan Walden had been teaching several of my novels for years in his Holocaust literature course. Out of respect for Dan and in gratitude for including my books on his syllabus, I had traveled on...