In Memory of John McCormick 1918–2010

John McCormick died of pneumonia in York, England, on April 1st. After his retirement from Rutgers, where he was a professor of comparative literature (1959–1987), he and his wife, Mairi MacInnes, lived in the York locale for many years, having moved there from Princeton.

Professor McCormick was a native of Minnesota who was educated at the University of Minnesota (ba, 1941; magna cum laude) and Harvard University (PhD, 1951). He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine and then, during World War ii, in the U.S. Navy. In his last assignment he was the captain of an antisubmarine vessel. After his wartime service and graduate work, he was dean of the Salzburg Seminar in American studies (1951–52) and was professor of American studies at the Free University in Berlin (1952–59) before joining the graduate faculty at Rutgers. During his career he was a lecturer in the Christian Gauss Seminar (1969) and a fellow in the Indiana University School of Letters (1970). He also taught at the universities of Mexico, Leeds, and Hachioji (Tokyo). His honors include a prize for nonfiction from the Longview Foundation, an award from the American Academy, two Guggenheim fellowships, and an neh fellowship.

Such are the bare bones of a long and distinguished career in which he wrote eleven books, chiefly in the scholarly and critical vein on American and European literature. One of them is an account of bullfighting; another a highly regarded biography of Santayana; and the penultimate, Seagoing (2000), is a memoir presented in a series of essays. Seagoing reveals that John McCormick was a self-made man who earned his own way in the academy—by pluck and persistence and unremitting toil. One of the many languages he acquired was the parlance of civilized people, in or out of the academy. Any conversation with John was a treat for the interlocutor because he was an old-fashioned gentleman more interested in whom he was talking to than in himself. People from all walks of life relished his company.

We have beheld a distinguished man who did well in all he set out to do and who should be remembered for his accomplishments as a human being, a scholar and a teacher, a seaman, a husband and father, and a man of the world. Death may have been proud to have taken John McCormick, but we are profoundly grieved by his loss.