William Van O'Connor
William Van O'Connor (10 January 1915 – 26 September 1966) was an American literary critic, editor, educator and author.
Contents
Biography
William Van O'Connor was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of Sarsfield and Violet Belle McKnight O'Connor. He received his A.B. (1936) and his M.A. (1937) from Syracuse University, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1947).
Prior to World War II, O'Connor taught at Ohio State University (1940–1941), and at Louisiana State University (1941–1943). A tour in the United States Army which included service in New Guinea from 1943–1946 saw him rise to the rank of Staff Sergeant. After being discharged, he taught at the University of Minnesota (1946–1962), and at the University of California at Davis (1962–1966), in the latter case as chairman of the English department.
He received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (1946–1947), acted as executive editor of American Quarterly (1949–1951), served as Berg Professor of English and American literature at New York University (1958), and was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Liège, Belgium (1953–1954), and at the University of Hull, England (1964–1965).
Works
- Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry (1918)
- New Woman of the Renaissance (1942)
- Climates of Tragedy (1943)
- Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach (1948; editor)
- The Shaping Spirit: A Study of Wallace Stevens (1950)
- Campus on the River (1950)
- An Age of Criticism, 1900-1950 (1952)
- The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (1954)
- Modern Prose, Form and Structure (1958)
- History of the Arts in Minnesota (1958)
- William Faulkner (1959)
- A Casebook on Ezra Pound (1959; with Edward Stone)
- The Grotesque: An American Literary Genre (1962)
- A Key to American Literature (1962)
- The New University Wits (1963)
- Ezra Pound (1963)
- Religion and American Literature (1966; with Robert Wiggin and Joyce Cary)
- Seven Modern American Novelists (1964)
- High Meadow (1964; poetry)
References
- Weber, Brom (1969–1970). "A Tribute to William Van O'Connor," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XV, No. 4 , pp. 463–66.
