Chronicles, as the premier journal of real American culture, takes notice, though belatedly, of the loss of two great scholars of American literature.  They were both admirers and faithful readers of this magazine, to which I had the pleasure of introducing them.  I knew and learned from both and like to think that I was respected as a scholar by both, given that I was the only historian regularly invited by either to sit on doctoral-dissertation committees in the University of South Carolina English Department, where both served.  And given that both, being great scholars, naturally had no high opinion of the professionalism of most academics.  A great scholar is perhaps even rarer than a great writer.

James Babcock Meriwether (1928-2007) was the seminal and foremost Faulkner scholar of the world.  He began the collecting and careful textual study of Faulkner’s work as a graduate student at Princeton (where he was a classmate of George Garrett) even before the revival of interest that followed the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Meriwether did not publish a great deal.  Rather, he considered it his given role to foster careful research, the results of which were numerous doctoral dissertations, carefully corrected and authenticated texts, and countless articles by others.

Meriwether could easily have held chairs at more prestigious institutions like North Carolina or Texas, but he returned home because of his deep roots in, and love for, South Carolina, something that was surely without parallel in academia in the second half of the 20th century.  His Faulkner seminars were legendary, but he insisted on regularly teaching freshman English composition as well.  Faulkner led him, perceptively, to Faulkner’s predecessors in the Old South, and his seminal work incorporated such figures as William Gilmore Simms and A.B. Longstreet.  That does not cover all the work he inspired or all his interests.  Meriwether’s Toscanini collection, now at the university, is remarkable.  Thanks to Jim, I have a tape of Toscanini’s rousing rendition of “Dix-ie” as he conducted it on his postwar tour of the United States.

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (1931-2008) is perhaps best known as the premier F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar, but that does not begin to cover his contributions to the study of American literature, which extend to the Fitzgerald age and Fitzgerald’s contemporaries and beyond.  Perhaps his most lasting achievement is the marvelous Dictionary of Literary Biography, founded and directed by Bruccoli, with two partners, now at over 400 volumes.

His achievement that I value most is the editing and publication, with his wife, Arlyn, of O Lost by Thomas Wolfe.  This is the authentic version of Wolfe’s masterpiece, which was mangled and truncated by Maxwell Perkins into the inferior Look Homeward, Angel.  (The execrable Perkins was long hyped as the masterful editor who had “made” Wolfe and other important writers.)

My two colleagues could not have been more unalike and, truth be told, did not much care for each other.  Matt was a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science.  He was visible on campus for his red sports car, Groucho Marx mustache, and brusque Bronx manner (which did indeed cover a kind heart).  He lived contentedly at home in South Carolina for 40 years.  Jim had the charm of old Carolina, gracious but with a subtle undercurrent of incorrigible pride.  He loved South Carolina and thus was forced to live discontentedly with what the state and its university were becoming.  Matt’s mission was to document the history of American literature, while Jim’s was to infuse dedication and rigor in the next generation of scholars.  (Several of his Ph.D. students have contributed to Chronicles.)  Given the now nearly completed deconstruction of the American academy, we shall not see their like again.