Obituary for G. R. Thompson

The eminent scholar of early American literature, G. Richard Thompson, passed away peacefully on December 12, 2019. He was admired by his many students, who valued him for his incisive intellect and heartfelt guidance on countless papers, theses, and dissertations. Over nearly forty years of teaching at Washington State University and Purdue University, he guided many new professors into the academy and set a high standard of scholarly integrity, teaching excellence, and committed mentorship. He was known for his passion for literature and the profession of literary studies. He was a master of wit and an expert in romantic irony; it was usually the wit alone that found expression in conversation as he reflected upon his professional life. His ironic sensibility was often checked and mitigated as he pondered his life as a scholar. For him, the act of studying and teaching was a calling and a blessing.Upon meeting Dick Thompson, students were often stilled by his serious manner and the questions he posed about their goals and commitments. He expected an intensity and focus equal to what he would devote to them. But in the same conversations they quickly learned that they could expect to experience his whole heart. Literature for Dick was more than language but a mode of living, a way of experiencing the world and other human beings with intimacy and empathy. He gifted them with more than his considerable scholarship: he generously shared the nuances of thought and reflection that had led him to the world of words and the life of the mind. He brought this same sensibility to his colleagues, especially the many young professors he had been instrumental in hiring. He taught them, graced them with the breadth of his experience, and mentored them with the same energy and attention that he devoted to his many admiring students.Dick Thompson (fig. 1) was born on December 11, 1937, and raised in the town of Glendale, California, in the greater Los Angeles area, and he attended undergraduate school at the San Fernando campus of the Los Angeles College of Applied Arts and Sciences, which is now California State University, Northridge. He completed his doctorate at the University of Southern California and took his first tenure-track teaching job at Washington State University. While only in his second year as an assistant professor, he founded the Poe Newsletter, which soon became Poe Studies. He served as editor and coeditor until 1979 and remained on the editorial board until the end of his career. As the journal evolved under his leadership, it played a central role in reinvigorating the study of Edgar Allan Poe attracting contributions from many established scholars as well as new voices in Poe criticism. During that time, Thompson published essays in such journals as PMLA, American Literature, and Studies in Short Fiction, among other venues. In 1970, he edited Harper's Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 1973 he published his seminal Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973, 50th Anniversary Edition 2023), which was nominated for the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize.His other accomplishments are too many to enumerate completely, and though his contribution to the study of Poe is unparalleled, his work extended far beyond the writings of one author. He was perhaps our foremost scholar in nineteenth-century narrative aesthetics, and his scholarship includes contributions dealing with various authors and genres in the American Renaissance and the late nineteenth century. Among these is his tremendously important study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales (1993), which applies narratological insights in a systematic mapping of Hawthorne's aesthetic figuration in the nineteenth-century story cycle. Thompson was instrumental in the founding of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and some of his many other collections and edited anthologies include Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe: Critical Essays in Honor of Darrell Abel (1981), coedited with Virgil L. Lokke; The Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1970, 1974); The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (1974); Ritual, Realism, and Revolt: Major Traditions in the Drama (1972), coedited with J. C. Taylor; Romantic Gothic Tales: 1790–1840 (1979); the Library of America's Essays and Reviews of Edgar Allan Poe (1984); and the Norton Critical Edition's The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (2004). He also published four monographs on Poe and thirty-eight articles and book chapters. He collaborated with Eric Carl Link to publish Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), a volume that served to correct the historical record on the validity of the novel/romance distinction in the nineteenth century, a partitioning that was first argued by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). Together with his Purdue colleague Robert Paul Lamb, Thompson coedited Wiley/Blackwell's A Companion to American Fiction: 1865–1914 (2005), and he later published the magisterial Reading the American Novel: 1865–1914 (2011).In 2007, to honor his contribution to the profession as both a teacher and a scholar, two of his former graduate students, Steven Frye and Eric Carl Link, edited a festschrift special edition of Poe Studies that included contributions from such distinguished scholars as Michael Colacurcio, John Carlos Rowe, J. Gerald Kennedy, Grace Farrell, and his Purdue colleagues Leonard Neufeldt and Robert Paul Lamb. The volume also included articles from former graduate students. In addition to Frye and Link, the special edition contains essays from the late Philip Roth scholar Derek Parker Royal and the eminent Herman Melville scholar Brian Yothers. This collection is a testimony to the respect and admiration Thompson earned from Americanists nationally and internationally across many generations. He was named an honorary member of the Poe Studies Association in 1988, and the Poe Review chose Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales as the first entry in its column "Critical Reassessments."In addition to his scholarship, Dick Thompson possessed a tremendous ability to cultivate a passion for literature in others. His home was always open to the students he mentored through graduate school and the friends and colleagues with whom he worked and studied. His walls were lined with original art, and one piece was marked with his sense of things. It was an abstract portrait of Jesus on the cross, figured not only as Christ but as an emblem of an everyman, a suffering servant, a martyr to the cause of many things, not the least of which is the shattered elegance that gives grace to a broken world. It spoke to Dick Thompson's sensibility, his sensitivity to the darkness, and his deep appreciation of the beauty that offers clarity and illumination. Dick brought this light to the many friends, colleagues, and students he spent so much time with. He did so with honesty, benevolence, and a heartfelt attention to their place in a tarnished universe. In pondering the painting in the edition of Poe Studies published in Dick's honor, his former graduate student and coauthor Eric Carl Link, now Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of North Dakota, wrote this:This was Melville's stark and mitigated epiphany. Dick was a Dark Romantic, ever skeptical of completeness and the full flowering of an Emersonian apotheosis. But in a striking moment in 1993, during a course in the American Renaissance, he spoke fondly of the great Transcendentalist. He read from Emerson's journal and whispered the entry in which he grieves the death of his young son Waldo. Dick broke for an instant and quietly apologized, paused and gathered himself, then went on reading. In sharing the passage, he wanted his students to understand that Emerson's optimism was purchased at a price beyond knowing. It was a telling and emblematic moment for everyone in the class that evening. Dick Thompson, the formidable intellect, the professor, the renowned scholar, was all these things. He was also a man of intensity, strength, and vulnerability. The professional accomplishments and the personal attributes reflected one another through the prismatic vision of an extraordinary man. This and many moments form the substance of an exemplary life of teaching, scholarship, and heartfelt friendship.