Douglas Day

Douglas Turner Day III (1 May 1932 – 10 October 2004) was an American novelist, biographer, scholar and critic. He was a popular professor of English literature[Note 1] at the University of Virginia, where he taught almost four decades.

Douglas Day
Day in 1999 on the border between Venezuela and Brazil (Sheila McMillen 1999)
Born(1932-05-01)May 1, 1932
Panama
DiedOctober 10, 2004(2004-10-10) (aged 72)
Virginia, USA
OccupationProfessor of English, Writer
GenreBiography, Criticism, Novel

Early life

Douglas Day was born in Colón, Panama. The son of a US Navy officer, he served as a fighter pilot in the US Marine Corps in the early 1950s. He took three degrees at the University of Virginia before joining the English faculty there in 1962. [1]

Career

Day taught at the University of Virginia for 38 years; he was an early advocate of studying contemporary Hispanic and Latin American writers and literature. His study of the poetry of Robert Graves, his first book of literary criticism, won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for scholarly writing in 1963. Fluent in Spanish, he also edited a collection of plays by Federico Garcia Lorca.[1]

Day documented the turbulent life of English novelist Malcolm Lowry, the alcoholic author of Under the Volcano. For that he shared the 1974 National Book Award in Biography. [2] Previously, he and Lowry's widow Margerie edited the novelist's posthumous novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1969).

In 1973 he edited a 'restored' and definitive version of William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, which was originally published in truncated form as Sartoris.

Other books by Douglas Day include Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves (1963) and two novels: Journey of the Wolf (1977)— for which he received the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon (1991).

Bibliography
  • The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. ISBN 0-15-174598-6.
  • Journey of the Wolf. New York: Atheneum, 1977. ISBN 0-689-10771-4.
  • Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-19-501711-0.
  • Willian Faulkner's Flags in the Dust (1973); editor.
  • Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.
  • Malcolm Lowry's Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1969); editor, with Margerie Lowry.

Notes
  1. i.e. Literature in the English language
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References
  1. Bromley, Anne (Oct 29-Nov 11, 2004.). "The Adventure Ends for Writer and English Professor Douglas Day". Inside UVA Online. Archived from the original on 2 March 2012. Retrieved 9 February 2012. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. NB: The award was split between Day and John Clive.
    "National Book Awards, 1974". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 20 February 2012.
  • Fox, Margalit. "Douglas Day, 72, Malcolm Lowry Biographer is Dead." New York Times, 19 October 2004.
  • Sullivan, Patricia. "Douglas T. Day III; Writer, Educator." The Washington Post, 16 October 2004.
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