In Memoriam: A. Owen Aldridge

A. Owen Aldridge, the most senior active scholar of early American literature, died on January 29, 2005, at age 89. A pioneer of the hemispheric study of American literature, he was fluent in four modern languages, having mastered Japanese in his 60s, as well as being a capable Latinist. A New Yorker, Aldridge was educated at Indiana University, the University of Georgia, and Duke University, where he received his Ph.D. in English in 1942. He took a Docteur Littérature compare at the Université de Paris in 1955. His earliest scholarship had to do with the spread of Enlightenment ideology, particularly Deism. He was particularly interested in cosmopolitan figures with transatlantic or pan-European careers: the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Tom Paine. During the 1950s and early 1960s his work compared the Enlightenments in Britain, France, and North America. In the mid-1960s he expanded his interest to include South America and declared himself to be a Comparative Literature scholar. In the mid-1970s he became fascinated with Asian literature, particularly that of Japan, and worked as a visiting professor at Nihon University in Japan on two occasions. Over the course of his career he taught at the University of Buffalo, the University of Maryland, and the University of Illinois. Of his many books, he will be particularly remembered for his biography of Paine, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (1959), Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (1965), and Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach (1982), a work that anticipates the current hemispheric turn in early American literary study. He last appeared in the pages of EAL in 2004 (vol. 39, 1), publishing a note: "Feeling or Fooling in Benjamin Franklin's 'The Elysian Fields.' "