Louis J. Budd (1921–2010)

In December 2010, the field of American literary scholarship, generally, and Mark Twain studies, particularly, lost an original. An academic luminary to be sure, Lou Budd was James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, recipient of the prestigious Jay B. Hubbell Medallion, editor of American Literature, and author of more than seventy scholarly publications, including two legitimately seminal books on Mark Twain, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962) and Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983). Despite his long and imposing list of professional achievements, Lou will likely be remembered first as a man of extraordinary humility and limitless generosity. In his manner, his speech, his aspect, he was the epitome of modesty. And yet this wonderfully unpretentious man personally touched the lives and careers of scores of young literary scholars during his nearly seventy-year tenure within the academy. It is a little difficult to imagine what modern-day American literature studies would have looked like without Lou Budd.

He was born Louis John Budrewicz on August 26, 1921, in St. Louis, Missouri, to eastern European immigrants. (Following his brother’s lead, Lou would eventually shorten his surname to Budd.) His father, Vincent Budrewicz, was a native of Poland who emigrated from Lithuania in 1910 after being discharged as a reservist from the Russian Army. His mother, Zofia Kajszo, a Lithuanian, came to the United States the following year. The couple had three children, a daughter and two sons, of which Lou was the youngest. Vincent worked most of his life in the United States as a laborer in a shoe factory and Zofia in a small commercial bakery less than a block from the family home. A devout Roman Catholic, Lou’s mother sent her children to the predominantly Irish St. Leo’s Parochial School and had even hoped that Lou would someday become a priest. A gifted student from an early age, Lou graduated from St. Louis’s Central High School at 15.

Lou’s formal interest in literary studies began at the University of Missouri where he majored in English literature. At Missouri he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned his B.A. in 1941 and his M.A. in 1942. After a short teaching stint lasting only a few months he was drafted into the United States Army in late 1942. By 1944 he had been promoted and was serving in the Army Air Force as a navigation instructor. In 1945 Lou was discharged at the end of World War II as a second lieutenant and married Isabelle Amelia Marx, a union that would last sixty years and produce two children, David and Cathy. The GI Bill enabled Lou to pursue a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Wisconsin, whose faculty at the time included prominent Americanist Harry Hayden Clark. Lou wrote a dissertation on William Dean Howells’ political sensibilities and took his doctorate in 1949.

He began his first teaching appointment at the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1949, the same year that Lyman T. Johnson won his lawsuit to open the school to African-American students. Three years later in 1952 Lou relocated his family to Durham, North Carolina, and joined the faculty at Duke University where, with the exception of short summer lectureships at Wisconsin in 1954 and Northwestern University in 1961, he would teach for the rest of his career. The move would prove to be ideal for the 30-year old aspiring Americanist. Duke was the home of Jay B. Hubbell, who in the 1920s with the help of a handful of other literature professors had practically invented professional American literary studies. Hubbell was a giant in the field. Not only was he was the visionary behind the founding of American Literature in 1929, serving as the influential journal’s editor for nearly a quarter century, he was also the author of the most widely used American literature anthology in our nation’s universities until the late 1950s when the Norton Anthology of American Literature appeared and quickly became the new standard for academic literary textbooks.

Lou’s major scholarly work...