Richard Marius
Encyclopedia
Richard Curry Marius was an American academic and writer.
He was a scholar of the Reformation
, novelist of the American South
, speechwriter, and teacher of writing and English literature
at Harvard University
. He was widely published, leaving behind major biographies of Thomas More
and Martin Luther
, four novels set in his native Tennessee
, several books on writing, and a host of scholarly articles for academic journals and mainstream book reviews.
Working from a small cluttered office atop Harvard's Widener Library
and an equally cluttered study in his home in Belmont, Massachusetts
, Marius was a charismatic raconteur, a provocative political activist, and a devoted wearer of bowties. He was also an enthusiastic cyclist, biking to Cambridge, Massachusetts
, from his home in Belmont and taking frequent bike trips in the French countryside until his health failed in 1998. Over the years, he mentored many Harvard students who went on to be scholars, journalists, and other kinds of professional writers.
, evolved into a fiery figure of 1960s campus political activism, and became a respected Reformation historian on the Harvard faculty. Through it all, he had a complicated and lifelong engagement with Christianity
, wrestling with matters of faith—and its loss—both in his scholarship and in his novels.
. His mother was a former reporter for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in the 1920s and 1930s.
and fundamentalist Christian whose religious faith had a particularly strong influence over him. His love of literature and poetic imagery may have been formed by her habit of reading to her children every day from
the King James Version of the Bible
. After Marius' older brother was born with Down syndrome
, his mother told Marius how she had prayed that if her next son were born healthy, he would devote himself to Jesus
. Richard Marius was born healthy.
As a young man, Marius shared his mother's fundamentalism, attending daily Christian services and carrying a Bible with him in college. He even felt a calling to be a minister, earning a divinity degree. But he grew increasingly skeptical of religion and lost his faith in his 20's, even though he would devote much of the rest of his life to studying Reformation-era Christianity. Marius would later attribute his loss of faith in part to his intellectual engagement with W.T. Stace
, an English-born philosopher. He was particularly affected by Stace's essay Man Against Darkness, which includes the statement that:
His novel An Affair of Honor (2001) features a protagonist, Charles Alexander, who like Marius becomes caught between the traditional morality of his upbringing and the freethinking he encounters at University of Tennessee and in W.T. Stace. As Marius evolved toward atheism
, he developed what would become a lifelong distaste for the religious right
. But toward the end of his life, he began attending services again, first at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard
and later at a Unitarian
church.
in journalism
in 1954 from the University of Tennessee
, where he first gained recognition for his writing skills. Attending college classes in the morning, he worked in the afternoons as a reporter for the Lenoir City News, writing a column called "Rambling with Richard." In 1955, he married Gail Smith; they would have two children, Richard and Fred, before later divorcing. Marius then enrolled in a divinity program at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary despite an increasing crisis of faith. He took a year off, spending 1956-57 in Europe as a Rotary Fellow in history at the University of Strasbourg
, then returned to another Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky
, from which he graduated with a B.D.
in 1958. Immediately afterward, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut
to begin graduate work in Reformation history at Yale University
. Marius earned a M.A.
in 1959 and a Ph.D.
in 1962, after writing a dissertation entitled "Thomas More and the Heretics."
from 1962–1964 before returning to his home state to take a position on the faculty of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. According to his friend and colleague, University of Tennessee professor Milton Klein, Marius quickly became one of the most popular humanities teachers on the campus:
During this period, Marius also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War
and an early organizer of protests against the conflict, as well as against the Ku Klux Klan
. Most notably, he co-organized a protest at a 1970 Billy Graham
evangelistic crusade rally in the university's football stadium at which President Richard Nixon
appeared shortly after the Kent State shootings
. Although Marius' plan was for the 1,000 or so anti-war protesters to hold a "silent" protest amid the 70,000 pro-Graham spectators in the stadium, the protest turned unruly.
Marius also joined three other junior faculty members that year in suing the university when its chancellor refused to allow the black comedian and anti-war activist Dick Gregory
to speak on campus, winning a court order to create an "open campus" by ending a university policy of requiring administrative approval before student-invited speakers could come to the campus. He also successfully pushed to end the university's practice of holding sectarian religious convocations.
Marius' sometimes provocative statements and political efforts, which clashed with the prevailing view in the conservative state of Tennessee, led to threats against him and his family. During the Dick Gregory fight, he purchased a revolver for protection, which he said he sometimes slept with.
This intense period was also marked by other beginnings, Marius wrote his first novel, The Coming of Rain, which was published in 1969. The following year, he married Lanier Smythe, an art historian who later became chair of humanities at Boston
's Suffolk University
; they had a son named John. In 1974, he published his first scholarly book, a short biography of Martin Luther (a subject to which he would return in full 25 years later). In 1976, he published his second novel, Bound for the Promised Land.
Although Marius would leave Tennessee for Harvard in 1978, he maintained his ties to his home state's university. For example, he founded and directed an annual summer writing conference, the Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing, on the Knoxville campus. In 1999, the University of Tennessee College of Communications gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award.
In addition to his work as director of the writing program, his scholarly research, and his fiction writing, Marius taught a series of courses for the university's Department of English and American Literature and Language. He taught a lecture course on William Shakespeare
's history plays and a freshman-only seminar on Southern writers, focusing on Mark Twain
and William Faulkner
. He also served as a tutor and thesis advisor to numerous students. In 1990, the Harvard Undergraduate Council voted to give him the Levenson Award for "outstanding teaching by a senior faculty member."
Marius also played a broader role in campus life. He coached the students charged with delivering annual commencement addresses each year and helped Harvard's presidents develop their graduation speeches. He also for years wrote the university's citations for the honorary degrees awarded to luminaries at commencement exercises. In 1993, Marius was awarded the Harvard Foundation Medal for his efforts to improve racial relations. He served as a faculty advisor to the Signet Society, a creative arts club, and he and his wife spent a semester during the 1996-97 academic year as acting masters of Adams House, an undergraduate residence hall.
. He succeeded, turning in the final manuscript several months before he died in his home on November 5, 1999. His ashes were buried below Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
in Concord, Massachusetts
, near the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, Henry David Thoreau
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Louisa May Alcott
.
personally offered Marius a White House speechwriting position heading into the 1996 presidential campaign. Marius had previously written, without pay, several speeches for his fellow Tennessee native, including a 1993 Madison Square Garden
oration for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
and parts of Gore's 1994 Harvard commencement address attacking the "culture of cynicism." Marius accepted the offer to join the White House, took an 18-month leave of absence from Harvard, rented out his home, and prepared to move to Washington, DC. But Gore rescinded the offer after New Republic
editor-in-chief and part-time Harvard social studies lecturer Martin Peretz
pressured the vice president to reverse Marius' hiring.
In a favorable 1992 review of the book A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village by Helen Winternitz, Marius had written this in Harvard's alumni magazine:
Peretz, a passionate supporter of Israel, sent Gore a copy of the 1992 review, accusing Marius of anti-Semitism
. He told Gore, his former student when Gore was an undergraduate at Harvard, to reverse the hiring. Gore complied. According to press accounts, a Gore staffer called Marius and asked him to announce that he had changed his mind about accepting the position. But when reporters called him, Marius declined to pretend that the decision had been his.
Peretz told the Washington Post:
Marius allowed that his Gestapo-Shin Bet comparison may have been "a little bit extreme," but he refused to disavow it, insisting that he was criticizing only the harsh tactics of the secret police and otherwise supported the state of Israel. Marius said he "never had an anti-Semitic thought in his life" and that he was "just floored" by the turn of events: "I'm just sorry about it because I believe I could have helped the vice president."
Many observers have said that Peretz's charge of anti-Semitism on the part of Marius—who castigated figures such as Martin Luther for their anti-Semitic writings in his scholarly work—was false. Marius claimed that Peretz had seen Marius as a rival ever since 1993, when Gore largely chose to use Marius' image-rich Holocaust speech for the Warsaw Uprising event, keeping only a paragraph from an alternate, statistics-laden speech Peretz had submitted to Gore. University of Tennessee historian Milton Klein, whose European relatives were murdered during the Holocaust in Hungary, said that he and Marius had often argued about the Israel-Palestine issue during their 26 years of friendship, but Marius had never said a single thing that indicated any anti-Semitic feelings. In Gore: A Political Life, ABC News
correspondent Bob Zelnick wrote that Marius had no history of anti-Semitism and that "most [of Gore's staff] felt that Marius had been wronged and that the vice president had acted to keep Peretz happy rather than to protect his office."
The Coming of Rain, was Marius' first novel and established Bourbon County, a fictional landscape which closely resembled his native Loudon County and in which most of his fiction would be set. The book followed the lives of a set of small town characters in the border state in the traumatic period following the American Civil War
. Joyce Carol Oates
reviewed the novel for The New York Times Book Review, calling it "a slender, tragic, perhaps beautiful story of the ruins of dreams." The Book-of-the-Month Club made the novel an alternate selection. Marius later converted it into a stageplay, which was produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998.
Bound for the Promised Land also begins in East Tennessee, but the setting soon migrates to the West. Set in the 1850s amid the Gold Rush
, it follows a family in a wagon train that sets out through Indian Country for California. To research the novel, Marius retraced the trail of the wagon trains with his family.
Marius' third novel, After the War, returned to Bourbon County in the post-World War I
period. Drawing on the biographical experiences of his parents, the novel concerned a Greek
immigrant who moves to Tennessee after fighting in the Great War for Belgium
. The protagonist marries a local woman who becomes increasingly fundamentalist Christian as time goes on. He is also haunted by the ghosts of three friends who died in the war. Marius wanted to title the novel "Once in Arcadia
," but his publisher believed that too few readers would understand the reference to the classical Greek refuge. Both Publishers Weekly
and the New York Times named it one of the best novels of the year. The latter made it an "editor's choice," calling it "an old-fashioned blockbuster, richly packed with characters" and its reviewer, Robert Ward, wrote that the novel "moved me, made me laugh out loud, broke my heart."
Marius completed his last and perhaps most autobiographical novel, An Affair of Honor, several months before his death. It was published posthumously in 2001. Set in Bourbon County in 1953, the novel examines the post-World War II
transition of the South through the prism of a young reporter, the son of the Greek immigrant hero of "After the War", who witnesses a man kill his unfaithful wife according to the "code of the hills", and the resulting murder trial.
's break with Catholicism
, and of Martin Luther (1999), the monk whose criticism of the Catholic Church inspired the Protestant Reformation.
Both books were widely praised. The More volume was finalist for a National Book Award, and both biographies were History Book Club main selections. Both books were also controversial because they stripped their subjects of the sanctity ascribed to them by admirers, instead presenting them as human beings struggling with their beliefs, fears, ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses. Marius also judged his subjects from a modern perspective, criticizing More for religious fanaticism and intolerance because he persecuted heretics, and criticizing Luther for his anti-Semitic writings, for example.
In the final year of his life, Marius traded bitter and sometimes personal academic attacks with Heiko Oberman, a rival Reformation historian at the University of Arizona
, who had written his own biography of Luther. Oberman attacked Marius for having analyzed Luther's personality from the modern psychological perspective of a man who feared death, insisting that Luther should be analyzed only in the terms of his own time—as a man who feared the Devil
.
Marius also translated from Latin More's Utopia
and co-edited three volumes of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More
.
As a teacher of writing, Marius emphasized clarity and directness. He asked his students to revise their drafts repeatedly, each time trying to communicate more simply and with fewer and shorter words. He advised making a rough outline before beginning to write and getting to the point quickly by setting up in the opening paragraph tensions that will be resolved by the end.
In his introduction to the third edition of A Writer's Companion, Marius wrote: "I don't care much for sappy personal writing, where writers tell me what they feel about things rather than what they know about things.
He was a scholar of the Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
, novelist of the American South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, speechwriter, and teacher of writing and English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He was widely published, leaving behind major biographies of Thomas More
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
and Martin Luther
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
, four novels set in his native Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
, several books on writing, and a host of scholarly articles for academic journals and mainstream book reviews.
Working from a small cluttered office atop Harvard's Widener Library
Widener Library
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, commonly known as Widener Library, is the primary building of the library system of Harvard University. Located on the south side of Harvard Yard directly across from Memorial Church, Widener serves as the centerpiece of the 15.6 million-volume Harvard...
and an equally cluttered study in his home in Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The population was 24,729 at the 2010 census.- History :Belmont was founded on March 18, 1859 by former citizens of, and land from the bordering towns of Watertown, to the south; Waltham, to the west; and Arlington, then...
, Marius was a charismatic raconteur, a provocative political activist, and a devoted wearer of bowties. He was also an enthusiastic cyclist, biking to Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, from his home in Belmont and taking frequent bike trips in the French countryside until his health failed in 1998. Over the years, he mentored many Harvard students who went on to be scholars, journalists, and other kinds of professional writers.
Life
Marius began life as a farmboy in East TennesseeEast Tennessee
East Tennessee is a name given to approximately the eastern third of the U.S. state of Tennessee, one of the three Grand Divisions of Tennessee defined in state law. East Tennessee consists of 33 counties, 30 located within the Eastern Time Zone and three counties in the Central Time Zone, namely...
, evolved into a fiery figure of 1960s campus political activism, and became a respected Reformation historian on the Harvard faculty. Through it all, he had a complicated and lifelong engagement with Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, wrestling with matters of faith—and its loss—both in his scholarship and in his novels.
Childhood
Marius was born in Dixie Lee Junction, Tennessee, on July 29, 1933, and grew up on a 20 acres (80,937.2 m²) Loudon County, Tennessee http://www.loudoncounty.org/ farm along with a sister and two brothers. His father was an immigrant from Greece who earned a chemical engineering degree in Belgium before settling in the United States, where he managed the foundry at the Lenoir Car Works of the Southern RailwaySouthern Railway (US)
The Southern Railway is a former United States railroad. It was the product of nearly 150 predecessor lines that were combined, reorganized and recombined beginning in the 1830s, formally becoming the Southern Railway in 1894...
. His mother was a former reporter for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in the 1920s and 1930s.
Religion
Marius' mother, Eunice, was a devout Southern BaptistSouthern Baptist Convention
The Southern Baptist Convention is a United States-based Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members...
and fundamentalist Christian whose religious faith had a particularly strong influence over him. His love of literature and poetic imagery may have been formed by her habit of reading to her children every day from
the King James Version of the Bible
King James Version of the Bible
The Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
. After Marius' older brother was born with Down syndrome
Down syndrome
Down syndrome, or Down's syndrome, trisomy 21, is a chromosomal condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome. It is named after John Langdon Down, the British physician who described the syndrome in 1866. The condition was clinically described earlier in the 19th...
, his mother told Marius how she had prayed that if her next son were born healthy, he would devote himself to Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
. Richard Marius was born healthy.
As a young man, Marius shared his mother's fundamentalism, attending daily Christian services and carrying a Bible with him in college. He even felt a calling to be a minister, earning a divinity degree. But he grew increasingly skeptical of religion and lost his faith in his 20's, even though he would devote much of the rest of his life to studying Reformation-era Christianity. Marius would later attribute his loss of faith in part to his intellectual engagement with W.T. Stace
Walter Terence Stace
Walter Terence Stace was a British civil servant, educator, philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, Mysticism, and Moral relativism...
, an English-born philosopher. He was particularly affected by Stace's essay Man Against Darkness, which includes the statement that:
- The problem of evil assumes the existence of a world-purpose. What, we are really asking, is the purpose of suffering? It seems purposeless. Our question of the why of evil assumes the view that the world has a purpose, and what we want to know is how suffering fits into and advances this purpose. The modern view is that suffering has no purpose because nothing that happens has any purpose: the world is run by causes, not by purposes.
His novel An Affair of Honor (2001) features a protagonist, Charles Alexander, who like Marius becomes caught between the traditional morality of his upbringing and the freethinking he encounters at University of Tennessee and in W.T. Stace. As Marius evolved toward atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, he developed what would become a lifelong distaste for the religious right
Christian right
Christian right is a term used predominantly in the United States to describe "right-wing" Christian political groups that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies...
. But toward the end of his life, he began attending services again, first at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard
Harvard Yard
Harvard Yard is a grassy area of about , adjacent to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that constitutes the oldest part and the center of the campus of Harvard University...
and later at a Unitarian
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
church.
Education
Marius earned a B.S.Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
in 1954 from the University of Tennessee
University of Tennessee
The University of Tennessee is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville, Tennessee, United States...
, where he first gained recognition for his writing skills. Attending college classes in the morning, he worked in the afternoons as a reporter for the Lenoir City News, writing a column called "Rambling with Richard." In 1955, he married Gail Smith; they would have two children, Richard and Fred, before later divorcing. Marius then enrolled in a divinity program at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary despite an increasing crisis of faith. He took a year off, spending 1956-57 in Europe as a Rotary Fellow in history at the University of Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
, then returned to another Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
, from which he graduated with a B.D.
Bachelor of Divinity
In Western universities, a Bachelor of Divinity is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course taken in the study of divinity or related disciplines, such as theology or, rarely, religious studies....
in 1958. Immediately afterward, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
to begin graduate work in Reformation history at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. Marius earned a M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
in 1959 and a Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1962, after writing a dissertation entitled "Thomas More and the Heretics."
University of Tennessee
After graduating from Yale, Marius taught history at Gettysburg CollegeGettysburg College
Gettysburg College is a private four-year liberal arts college founded in 1832, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States, adjacent to the famous battlefield. Its athletic teams are nicknamed the Bullets. Gettysburg College has about 2,700 students, with roughly equal numbers of men and women...
from 1962–1964 before returning to his home state to take a position on the faculty of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. According to his friend and colleague, University of Tennessee professor Milton Klein, Marius quickly became one of the most popular humanities teachers on the campus:
- At Tennessee, he acquired a reputation as a brilliant teacher ... earning the respect and admiration of a host of undergraduate and graduate students. He was one of those rare teachers whose 8 a.m. classes in Western Civilization were filled to capacity and whose lectures were so interesting that unregistered students sought to sneak in to hear them. His popularity was not diminished by his avoidance of short answer tests and his insistence that each student write a short essay every two weeks.
During this period, Marius also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
and an early organizer of protests against the conflict, as well as against the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
. Most notably, he co-organized a protest at a 1970 Billy Graham
Billy Graham
William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian evangelist. As of April 25, 2010, when he met with Barack Obama, Graham has spent personal time with twelve United States Presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman, and is number seven on Gallup's list of admired people for...
evangelistic crusade rally in the university's football stadium at which President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
appeared shortly after the Kent State shootings
Kent State shootings
The Kent State shootings—also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre—occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970...
. Although Marius' plan was for the 1,000 or so anti-war protesters to hold a "silent" protest amid the 70,000 pro-Graham spectators in the stadium, the protest turned unruly.
Marius also joined three other junior faculty members that year in suing the university when its chancellor refused to allow the black comedian and anti-war activist Dick Gregory
Dick Gregory
Richard Claxton "Dick" Gregory is an American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur....
to speak on campus, winning a court order to create an "open campus" by ending a university policy of requiring administrative approval before student-invited speakers could come to the campus. He also successfully pushed to end the university's practice of holding sectarian religious convocations.
Marius' sometimes provocative statements and political efforts, which clashed with the prevailing view in the conservative state of Tennessee, led to threats against him and his family. During the Dick Gregory fight, he purchased a revolver for protection, which he said he sometimes slept with.
This intense period was also marked by other beginnings, Marius wrote his first novel, The Coming of Rain, which was published in 1969. The following year, he married Lanier Smythe, an art historian who later became chair of humanities at Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
's Suffolk University
Suffolk University
Suffolk University is a private, non-sectarian, university located in Boston, Massachusetts and with over 16,000 students it is the third largest university in Boston...
; they had a son named John. In 1974, he published his first scholarly book, a short biography of Martin Luther (a subject to which he would return in full 25 years later). In 1976, he published his second novel, Bound for the Promised Land.
Although Marius would leave Tennessee for Harvard in 1978, he maintained his ties to his home state's university. For example, he founded and directed an annual summer writing conference, the Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing, on the Knoxville campus. In 1999, the University of Tennessee College of Communications gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Harvard University
In 1978, Marius joined Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he was the director of the Expository Writing Program from 1978 to 1994. Marius would spent the last 20 years of his life at Harvard, producing most of his major work there, including his major biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther and his final two novels.In addition to his work as director of the writing program, his scholarly research, and his fiction writing, Marius taught a series of courses for the university's Department of English and American Literature and Language. He taught a lecture course on William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's history plays and a freshman-only seminar on Southern writers, focusing on Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. He also served as a tutor and thesis advisor to numerous students. In 1990, the Harvard Undergraduate Council voted to give him the Levenson Award for "outstanding teaching by a senior faculty member."
Marius also played a broader role in campus life. He coached the students charged with delivering annual commencement addresses each year and helped Harvard's presidents develop their graduation speeches. He also for years wrote the university's citations for the honorary degrees awarded to luminaries at commencement exercises. In 1993, Marius was awarded the Harvard Foundation Medal for his efforts to improve racial relations. He served as a faculty advisor to the Signet Society, a creative arts club, and he and his wife spent a semester during the 1996-97 academic year as acting masters of Adams House, an undergraduate residence hall.
Death
After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1998, Marius retired from teaching in order to focus on completing his final novel, An Affair of Honor, amid the rigors of chemotherapyChemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with an antineoplastic drug or with a combination of such drugs into a standardized treatment regimen....
. He succeeded, turning in the final manuscript several months before he died in his home on November 5, 1999. His ashes were buried below Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a cemetery located on Bedford Street near the center of Concord, Massachusetts. The cemetery is the burial site of a number of famous Concordians, including some of the United States' greatest authors and thinkers, especially on a hill known as "Author's...
in Concord, Massachusetts
Concord, Massachusetts
Concord is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the town population was 17,668. Although a small town, Concord is noted for its leading roles in American history and literature.-History:...
, near the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
and Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women was set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, and published in 1868...
.
Al Gore-Israel controversy
In 1995, Vice President Al GoreAl Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
personally offered Marius a White House speechwriting position heading into the 1996 presidential campaign. Marius had previously written, without pay, several speeches for his fellow Tennessee native, including a 1993 Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...
oration for the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp....
and parts of Gore's 1994 Harvard commencement address attacking the "culture of cynicism." Marius accepted the offer to join the White House, took an 18-month leave of absence from Harvard, rented out his home, and prepared to move to Washington, DC. But Gore rescinded the offer after New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
editor-in-chief and part-time Harvard social studies lecturer Martin Peretz
Martin Peretz
Martin H. "Marty" Peretz , is an American publisher. Formerly an assistant professor at Harvard University, he purchased The New Republic in 1974 and took editorial control soon afterwards. He retained majority ownership until 2002, when he sold a two-thirds stake in the magazine to two financiers...
pressured the vice president to reverse Marius' hiring.
In a favorable 1992 review of the book A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village by Helen Winternitz, Marius had written this in Harvard's alumni magazine:
- Many Israelis, the Holocaust fresh in their memory, believe that that horror gives them the right to inflict horror on others. Winternitz's account of the brutality of the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, is eerily similar to the stories of the GestapoGestapoThe Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
... —arbitrary arrests in the middle of the night, imprisonment without trial, beatings, refined tortures, murder, punishment of the families of suspects.
Peretz, a passionate supporter of Israel, sent Gore a copy of the 1992 review, accusing Marius of anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
. He told Gore, his former student when Gore was an undergraduate at Harvard, to reverse the hiring. Gore complied. According to press accounts, a Gore staffer called Marius and asked him to announce that he had changed his mind about accepting the position. But when reporters called him, Marius declined to pretend that the decision had been his.
Peretz told the Washington Post:
- It's a very simple matter. What Richard Marius wrote did not go unnoticed in Cambridge and beyond, because it was the Harvard alumni magazine. When you make the Nazi analogy, it cannot be tossed off as, 'Oh, how silly of me to have done this.' When you write that, you believe it. So, once the vice president knew, he had to figure out if he wanted someone who believed that on his staff.
Marius allowed that his Gestapo-Shin Bet comparison may have been "a little bit extreme," but he refused to disavow it, insisting that he was criticizing only the harsh tactics of the secret police and otherwise supported the state of Israel. Marius said he "never had an anti-Semitic thought in his life" and that he was "just floored" by the turn of events: "I'm just sorry about it because I believe I could have helped the vice president."
Many observers have said that Peretz's charge of anti-Semitism on the part of Marius—who castigated figures such as Martin Luther for their anti-Semitic writings in his scholarly work—was false. Marius claimed that Peretz had seen Marius as a rival ever since 1993, when Gore largely chose to use Marius' image-rich Holocaust speech for the Warsaw Uprising event, keeping only a paragraph from an alternate, statistics-laden speech Peretz had submitted to Gore. University of Tennessee historian Milton Klein, whose European relatives were murdered during the Holocaust in Hungary, said that he and Marius had often argued about the Israel-Palestine issue during their 26 years of friendship, but Marius had never said a single thing that indicated any anti-Semitic feelings. In Gore: A Political Life, ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
correspondent Bob Zelnick wrote that Marius had no history of anti-Semitism and that "most [of Gore's staff] felt that Marius had been wronged and that the vice president had acted to keep Peretz happy rather than to protect his office."
Novels
Marius wrote four novels based in East Tennessee from roughly 1850 to 1950. Three—The Coming of Rain (1969), After the War (1992), and An Affair of Honor (2001)—form a loose trilogy. His second novel, Bound for the Promised Land (1976), is a stand-alone work.The Coming of Rain, was Marius' first novel and established Bourbon County, a fictional landscape which closely resembled his native Loudon County and in which most of his fiction would be set. The book followed the lives of a set of small town characters in the border state in the traumatic period following the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
reviewed the novel for The New York Times Book Review, calling it "a slender, tragic, perhaps beautiful story of the ruins of dreams." The Book-of-the-Month Club made the novel an alternate selection. Marius later converted it into a stageplay, which was produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998.
Bound for the Promised Land also begins in East Tennessee, but the setting soon migrates to the West. Set in the 1850s amid the Gold Rush
Gold rush
A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the United States, while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.In the 19th and early...
, it follows a family in a wagon train that sets out through Indian Country for California. To research the novel, Marius retraced the trail of the wagon trains with his family.
Marius' third novel, After the War, returned to Bourbon County in the post-World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
period. Drawing on the biographical experiences of his parents, the novel concerned a Greek
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
immigrant who moves to Tennessee after fighting in the Great War for Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
. The protagonist marries a local woman who becomes increasingly fundamentalist Christian as time goes on. He is also haunted by the ghosts of three friends who died in the war. Marius wanted to title the novel "Once in Arcadia
Arcadia
Arcadia is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the administrative region of Peloponnese. It is situated in the central and eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. It takes its name from the mythological character Arcas. In Greek mythology, it was the home of the god Pan...
," but his publisher believed that too few readers would understand the reference to the classical Greek refuge. Both Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
and the New York Times named it one of the best novels of the year. The latter made it an "editor's choice," calling it "an old-fashioned blockbuster, richly packed with characters" and its reviewer, Robert Ward, wrote that the novel "moved me, made me laugh out loud, broke my heart."
Marius completed his last and perhaps most autobiographical novel, An Affair of Honor, several months before his death. It was published posthumously in 2001. Set in Bourbon County in 1953, the novel examines the post-World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
transition of the South through the prism of a young reporter, the son of the Greek immigrant hero of "After the War", who witnesses a man kill his unfaithful wife according to the "code of the hills", and the resulting murder trial.
Scholarship
One of the pre-eminent Reformation scholars of his generation, Marius' two major scholarly works were biographies of Thomas More (1983), the English lawyer, Utopia writer, and politician who persecuted Protestants before being beheaded for refusing to accept Henry VIIIHenry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
's break with Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
, and of Martin Luther (1999), the monk whose criticism of the Catholic Church inspired the Protestant Reformation.
Both books were widely praised. The More volume was finalist for a National Book Award, and both biographies were History Book Club main selections. Both books were also controversial because they stripped their subjects of the sanctity ascribed to them by admirers, instead presenting them as human beings struggling with their beliefs, fears, ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses. Marius also judged his subjects from a modern perspective, criticizing More for religious fanaticism and intolerance because he persecuted heretics, and criticizing Luther for his anti-Semitic writings, for example.
In the final year of his life, Marius traded bitter and sometimes personal academic attacks with Heiko Oberman, a rival Reformation historian at the University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
, who had written his own biography of Luther. Oberman attacked Marius for having analyzed Luther's personality from the modern psychological perspective of a man who feared death, insisting that Luther should be analyzed only in the terms of his own time—as a man who feared the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
.
Marius also translated from Latin More's Utopia
Utopia (book)
Utopia is a work of fiction by Thomas More published in 1516...
and co-edited three volumes of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More
Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More
The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More is the standard scholarly edition of the works of Thomas More, published by Yale University Press. The first of the fifteen volumes to be published appeared in 1963, and the last in 1997...
.
Writing teacher
Marius served as director of Harvard's Expository Writing Program for 16 years. The only class that all undergraduates are required to take, Expos introduces Harvard freshmen to college-level writing. Marius developed the program's curriculum, hired much of its teaching staff, and wrote two books about writing. A Writer's Companion, now in its fifth edition, and A Short Guide to Writing About History, now in its fourth edition, are both widely used as textbooks for instructional writing programs. With Harvey Wiener, Marius also co-wrote the McGraw-Hill College Handbook.As a teacher of writing, Marius emphasized clarity and directness. He asked his students to revise their drafts repeatedly, each time trying to communicate more simply and with fewer and shorter words. He advised making a rough outline before beginning to write and getting to the point quickly by setting up in the opening paragraph tensions that will be resolved by the end.
In his introduction to the third edition of A Writer's Companion, Marius wrote: "I don't care much for sappy personal writing, where writers tell me what they feel about things rather than what they know about things.
Fiction
- An Affair of Honor. New York: Knopf, 2001.
- After the War. New York: Knopf, 1992.
- Bound for the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1976.
- The Coming of Rain. New York: Knopf, 1969.
Books
- Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels. Nancy Grisham Anderson, editor. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.
- Wrestling with God: The Meditations of Richard Marius. Nancy Grisham Anderson, editor. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.
- Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 1999.
- A Short Guide to Writing About History. New York: HarperCollins, 1989; 2nd ed., 1994.; 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1998; 4th ed., 2001; 5th ed., 2004.
- A Writer's Companion. New York: Knopf, 1985; 2nd ed. New York: McGraw, 1991; 3rd ed., 1994; 4th ed., 1998.
- The McGraw-Hill College Handbook (with Harvey Wiener). New York: McGraw, 1985; 2nd ed., 1988; 3rd ed., 1991; 4th ed., 1994.
- Thomas More: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1984; London: J. M. Dent, 1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
- Luther. New York: Lippincott, 1974; London: Quartet Books, 1975.
Editions
- The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry (with Keith Frome). New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
- Utopia and A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation by Thomas More. London: J. M. Dent, 1993.
- Letter to Bugenhagen. Supplication of Souls. Letter Against Frith (with Frank Manley et al.). New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Vol. 7 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. 15 vols. 1963-97.
- A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (with Thomas M. C. Lawler and Germain Marc'hadourGermain Marc'hadourGermain Marc'hadour was a professor of English at the Université Catholique de l'Ouest , an internationally recognized authority on the life and work of Thomas More and founder of the journal Moreana.-Life and career:...
). New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Vol. 6 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. 15 vols. 1963-97. - The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer (with Louis Schuster et al.). New Haven: Yale UP, 1973. Vol. 8 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. 15 vols. 1963-97.
External links
- Posthumous profile in Metro Pulse, a Knoxville weekly newspaper http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2001/1148/t_cover.html
- Obituary by his friend Milton Klein in the American Historical Association's magazine http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2000/0004/0004mem3.cfm
- Harvard University Gazette obituary http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/11.11/Marius.html
- March 2003 issue of "Southern Quarterly," with several essays and reminiscences about Richard Marius and his work http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4074/is_200307
- A more comprehensive bibliography, including paperback citations, foreign translations, articles, essays, and published interviews, but lacking some recent editions http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4074/is_200307/ai_n9246494