Douglas Turner III Day

Background

Douglas Day was born on the 1st of May, 1932 in Colon, Panama, where his father was stationed with the U.S. Navy.

Education

Douglas Day attended the University of Virginia, completing a Bachelor’s degree in 1954 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in 1962.

Career

In the early 1950s Douglas Day enlisted in the U.S. Marines, serving as a pilot until an automobile accident in 1955 grounded him. He left the Marines in 1957, but remained in the Marine Corps Reserve, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Douglas joined the University of Virginia in 1960 as an English instructor and became Commonwealth Professor of English in 1977. A popular teacher who was fluent in Spanish, Day was known for his knowledge of Latin-American literature and as an expert on writers William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry.

Douglas Day edited Faulkner's “Flags in the Dust” in 1973 and “Lowry's Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid” in 1968 and “Malcolm Lowry: A Biography” in 1973.

Later in his career, Day increasingly focused on his own fiction writing, while also teaching more creative writing classes. He was the author of the novels “Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves” that was published in 1963, “Journey of the Wolf” in 1977, “The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon” in 1991. He was working on his new novel at the time of his death.

Achievements

• Douglas Day’s critical studies and biographies were highly acclaimed, and he won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize in 1963 for his first book “Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves”, the National Book Award for Malcolm Lowry: A Biography and Rosenthal Award from the Institute of Arts and Letters for “Journey of the Wolf”.
  
  Douglas Day received Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts for US and Canadian Students in 1975.

Works

More photos

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  • The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon

    (Serving time in a U.S. penitentiary, Ricardo Flores Magon...)

    1991
  • Malcolm Lowry: A Biography 1973
  • Journey of Wolf 1977
  • Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves 1963