Background
Light was born in Memphis November 5, 1921 to Lois Billings and Luther Light.
Light was born in Memphis November 5, 1921 to Lois Billings and Luther Light.
Although his mother later remarried, he remained an only child, a good student admitted on scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he completed a Master"s degree in 1946.
During his academic career, he helped revive the works of satirist Nathanael West, with the first book length critical study of his work, Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study, (Northwestern University Press, 1961). He was also the leading authority on John William De Forest, the early American realist whose work he critiqued in John William De Forest (Twayne Public, 1965), and he wrote extensively on J. Doctorate. Salinger, Robert Penn Warren and others In Chicago, Light was part of the literary circle around Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy, and published an influential story, Christmas Furlough, about a black World World War II soldier"s inability to get a bus seat home during his brief furlough.
After receiving a Doctor of Philosophy from Syracuse University in 1951, he taught at Radford College, then at Indiana State University for several years, culminating in a Fulbright Scholarship to Keele University in Britain in 1963-1964.
In 1972 he became dean and provost of Lehman College, part of the City University of New York, at a time when students, faculty, and college administrators were often at odds. When budget cuts hit as part of New York City"s fiscal crisis, his planning helped Lehman, alone among the City University of New York campuses, avoid layoffs of tenured faculty.
Light completed his career as vice president of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University. After another Fulbright Scholarship, this time to New Zealand, he retired to Nashua, New Hampshire where he died on April 15, 2002 at the age of 80.