RARE! "Literature Pioneer" Dr Edward Strong Hand Signed 2.5X3.5 B&W Photo

Description: Up for auction a RARE! "In the Cage" Edward Strong Hand Signed 2.5X3.5 B&W Photo. ES-7342 William Van O’Connor was born in Syracuse, New York on Jan. 10, 1915, attended Christian Brothers Academy, and graduated from Syracuse University in 1937 with a jointly awarded B.A. and M.A. At Columbia University, he completed course work for his doctorate within two years, then took a teaching job at Ohio State University in 1940‑41. In 1941 O’Connor accepted an instructorship at Louisiana State University where he wrote his first book, The New Woman of the Renaissance, and worked with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Heilman and Robert Penn Warren, who were shaping American literary criticism. O’Connor met and married a Department colleague, Mary Allen, with whom he co-wrote his second book, Climates of Tragedy. During three years as a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army in New Guinea and the Philippines, O’Connor met Karl Shapiro with whom he shared friendship and his copy of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Shapiro later said the Oxford Book, together with the Bible and quotes in his head were his library for “Essay on Rime.” After the war, O’Connor received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and he began to write a new dissertation under his Columbia thesis committee headed by Lionel Trilling, and with Marjorie Hope Nicolson and William York Tindall. Invited to the English Department at the University of Minnesota by Chair Joseph Warren Beach, O’Connor was particularly glad to join a department where Robert Penn Warren was directing the Creative Writing Program. The Ph.D was awarded, and O’Connor’s thesis, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948. O’Connor rose to full professor at University of Minnesota within nine years and served as Director of Graduate Studies. In those years O’Connor taught summer session at the University of Puerto Rico, was the first Fulbright Lecturer to the University of Liege, Belgium, was Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University, and taught summer session at Duke University and at Columbia University. O’Connor was hired at UC Davis in 1961 to build a graduate program, and he became Chair in 1962. He began to build a graduate library to complement the collections at Shields Library. On his travels and in his administrative and scholarly pursuits, O’Connor sought out books and periodicals that would enhance the resources of the Department. Supporting the research and publications of his colleagues, O’Connor was a prolific writer of articles and reviews for both the popular and scholarly presses. In addition to the books mentioned above, his works include The Shaping Spirit: A Study of Wallace Stevens, 1950, reissued 1964; The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner, 1954, and William Faulkner, 1959; A Key to American Literature, 1962; The Grotesque: An American Literary Genre, 1962; and The New University Wits, 1963. O’Connor had suggested the successful “Pamphlets” format to the University of Minnesota Press and edited and wrote for that series, as well as editing and writing for the Modern Writers Pamphlet series of Columbia University Press. He edited Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach, 1948; Twentieth Century Literature in America with Frederick J. Hoffman, 1951-52; Poems for Study with Leonard Unger, 1953; Modern Prose: Form and Style, 1959; American Literary Forms, 1960; and Seven Modern American Novelists, 1964. O’Connor edited Religion and American Literature, 1964, in collaboration with his UCD colleague Robert Wiggins, a book that included chapters by other Davis faculty: Everett Carter, David Jacobson and Brom Weber. Translations of many of these publications were made into Asian, Arabic and other Romance languages. O’Connor also wrote an essay on the life and writings of William Faulkner for The Ladder Edition, a series for readers for whom English is a second language. O’Connor’s creative writing included short stories in Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner, and in his book, Campus on the River, 1960, which The New York Times said gave “heartening evidence that professors are part of the human race.” His poetry was published from 1943 across two decades, including the 1963 collection, High Meadow. He was writing poetry on illness and death at the end of his life. His play In the Cage, centering on Ezra Pound’s imprisonment by the U.S. Army in Pisa, Italy, was produced in Minneapolis in 1961, published in 1967 and produced off-Broadway in 1969. His poetic play, The Heron and the Hawk, 1963, was publicly read by the UCD Drama Department.

Price: 299.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2025-01-02T12:54:51.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD