Background
Roy Floyd Dibble was born on March 12, 1887 in Portland, Chautauqua County, New York, United States. He was the son of George E. Dibble, a farmer, and Miriam H. (Quilliam) Dibble.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Roy Floyd Dibble was born on March 12, 1887 in Portland, Chautauqua County, New York, United States. He was the son of George E. Dibble, a farmer, and Miriam H. (Quilliam) Dibble.
Dibble's life until he became of age was spent almost entirely in his native county, where he grew up on his father’s farm and attended the local schools at Elm Flats and Westfield. Graduating from the Westfield high school in 1906, he was prevented from proceeding directly to college by the necessity of caring for a sick brother. This and farming for his father were his occupations for the next two years; though it was at this time also that the reading he had done in Shakespeare inspired him to write a lengthy and resounding series of sonnets on the themes of love and poetry. In 1908 he entered Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, but at the end of the first term he went on to Clark University, where he graduated in 1912. After a summer’s walking tour in France and the British Isles he commenced a career as teacher at the Sanford School for boys, Redding Ridge, Conn. The reading he had done in college, however, together with his own natural bent determined that he should pursue the study of literature in a larger place, and in 1914 he entered the Graduate School of Columbia University.
Dibble was made a University Fellow in English and was given the position of instructor in English in Columbia College.
The remainder of his life was to be spent in New York, though an operation he was forced to undergo in the summer of 1916 led him to believe that less life remained for him than actually did. The surgeon who removed a tubercular kidney from his body told him that he had Addison’s Disease and had only three years to live. The general effect of this sentence was to dull the edge of his ambition, and to confirm in him a quietism which had always been present in his character but which had been encouraged for a number of years by annual readings of Thoreau’s Walden, which he often called his “bible. ”
His life proceeded uneventfully; the summers were spent either in Europe or on the farm near Westfield; the winters passed in teaching.
Meanwhile the business of teaching “war aims” at Columbia in 1918 had stirred him to make an examination of his ideas; the result was a sudden access of energy which at first expressed itself in terms of the prevailing radicalism, but which a little later found definite expression in a desire to write iconoclastic biographies in the manner of Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians, appearing in America, created a whole school of “new” biographers.
Dibble set to work upon a series of biographical essays which he published in 1923 under the title Strenuous Americans and with a dedication, somewhat less cryptic perhaps than he thought it, “To the Greatest Living Biographer. ” The subjects treated were Jesse James, Admiral Dewey, Brigham Young, Frances E. Willard, James J. Hill, P. T. Barnum, and Mark Hanna; the treatment was remarkable for its gusto, its narrative power, its pervasive though not always subtle irony, and its orotund, decorated, yet rapid style. Encouraged by the success of this book, Dibble resigned his position at Columbia in order that he might devote all of his time to authorship.
His next work was John L. Sullivan: An Intimate Narrative (1925), a rollicking and rather Rabelaisian life of still another strenuous American. This was followed in 1926 by Mohammed, where in he went far afield in search of picturesque and violent material. His interest thus aroused in religious leaders, he wrote a life of Martin Luther, but this volume failed to find a publisher; and in 1927 he resumed his teaching, becoming associate professor of English at Hunter College, New York City.
At the time of his death he had in hand a second collection of biographical essays, which he had contributed to various magazines. For the Dictionary of American Biography he wrote the article on Robert Prometheus Fitzsimmons.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
(Lang:- eng, Pages 406. Reprinted in 2013 with the help of...)
In appearance Dibble was short, stout, fair, and phlegmatic; he always lived alone; and though he had many friends, few of them ever got beyond the wellarmed exterior to the sensitive man within.
As a teacher at Columbia he made a greater impression upon his students, who found him contagiously enthusiastic about the authors he taught, than upon his colleagues, who found him singularly uninterested in himself.