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  • Remembering James M. Cox
  • George Core

James Cox was born in Independence, Virginia, in August of 1925. His ancestral home, a handsome three-story white frame house, with a stream running through the backyard and into a springhouse with a mill upstream, has stood for well over a century. It and its surrounding four hundred acres were as much a part of Jim as his love of literature, especially such American writers as Hawthorne, Emerson, Henry* Adams, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost. Independence was the perfect place for Jim Cox to have been born and raised and to have spent his youth and his old age, for nobody was more independent than Jim. And during World War ii he fought (as a submariner on the Dragonet) to help preserve this country’s independence.

After the war he completed his education at the University of Michigan (ba, ma) and at the Indiana University (Ph.D.). His graduate work was punctuated by two years of teaching at Emory and Henry College. Afterward he spent most of his career teaching, with great distinction, at Dartmouth College, where he earned a Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award from the Danforth Foundation in 1968 and an Avalon Humanities Award the next year. He received fellowships from Indiana University School of Letters, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

I first got to know Jim by writing him about some of his essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review, then edited by Charlotte Kohler. His natural mode was the essay, and he wrote regularly for many years for the Sewanee Review (beginning with “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn” in 1954 and ending with a tribute to Lewis Simpson in 2003) and the Southern Review, as well as the Virginia Quarterly. He published an anthology of criticism on Frost; his magnum opus, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966, recently reprinted); and a selection of pieces on autobiography, Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground. He had more than enough essays for another book on American literature but chose not to republish them.

Jim was a brilliant teacher and lecturer whose greatest interests were humor and autobiography. Humor defined him as a quick-witted and engaging man whose cleverness was always in play. No one knew more about humor than Jim Cox or was more humorous. His departure from our sullen world leaves it a duller and darker place. [End Page 1]

Footnotes

* See his “Beneath My Father’s Name,” Sewanee Review (summer 1991).

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