Walter B. Rideout

Walter Bates Rideout (born October 21, 1917 in Lee , Maine , † April 8, 2006 ) was an American English student . He taught from 1962 to 1986 as a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and was considered a leading expert on the work of the writer Sherwood Anderson .

Career

Walter Bates Rideout was the second child of Walter John Rideout and his wife Ruth, b. Brickett. He grew up mainly in Dover-Foxcroft , a town in Piscataquis County . After attending the Hartland Academy, he studied from 1934 to 1938 at Colby College in Maine and obtained his master's degree from Harvard University Graduate School in 1939 . During the Second World War he worked in Washington on the deciphering of Japanese codes. He later joined the US Navy , for which he did the same job in Pearl Harbor . He left the army in 1946 with the rank of senior lieutenant. In 1950 he received his doctorate in English literature from Harvard with a work on "The proletarian novel in the United States". From 1949 to 1962 he taught at Northwestern University . He then came to the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a visiting professor . There he was in charge of the English faculty from 1965 to 1968 and remained at the university until the end of his professional career. Most recently, he was Professor of American Literature of the 20th Century until he retired in 1986.

Rideout had been married since 1947, had two children and lived with his wife in Nakoma, a neighborhood in Madison.

honors and awards

• Newberry Library Fellowship
• directorship of the Northwestern University Program for Bell Telephone System Executives
• Guggenheim grant
• Mid-American Award
• Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature
• Distinguished Educator Award from Colby College

Publications (selection)

• The radical novel in the United States, 1900-1954: some interrelations of literature and society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1956.
• with Gay Wilson Allen and James K. Robinson: American poetry. Harper & Row, New York 1965.
• Sherwood Anderson: a collection of critical essays. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1974, ISBN 0-13-036558-0 .
• Sherwood Anderson: a writer in America. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2006, ISBN 0-299-21530-X .

swell

• Memorial Resolution of the Faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the Death of Professor Emeritus Walter B. Rideout. September 25, 2006 (PDF file, 72 KB, English)
• Rideout, Walter B. 1917-; Jacob, Hilda McLeod; and Maine State Library, "Walter B. Rideout Correspondence" (2015). Maine Writers Correspondence. Paper 451. (PDF file, 126 KB, English)

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter B. Rideout in the bibliographic database WorldCat