Stephen Emerson Whicher

Background

Stephen Emerson Whicher was born on June 16, 1915, in New York, United States. He was the son of George F. Whicher, professor at Amherst College, and Harriet Fox Whicher, a professor at Mount Holyoke College.

Education

Whicher attended Amherst High School and Exeter Academy and was awarded his Bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Amherst College (1936), after earning some dozen prizes for scholarship, public speaking, and work in English and classics. He received a Master’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University (1937) and the Ph.D. in English at Harvard University (1942).

In 1961, he was honored by his alma mater with the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Career

During the war, 1943-1946, Whicher served in the U.S. Navy as Ensign and Lieutenant and was stationed in the Pacific as a night fighter director. He earned combat stars at Iwo Jima and Tokyo in 1945.

Professor Whicher had a broad and varied academic experience before coming to Cornell in 1957. He had been a teaching fellow at Harvard (1938-1942), an instructor at the University of Rochester (1942-1943) and at Harvard (1946), and a member of the English Department at Swarthmore (Assistant Professor, 1947-1952; Associate Professor, 1952-1957).

He had also taught summers at Pennsylvania State University (1948) and New York University (1954-1955). A specialist in American literature, he was also interested in modern drama, and had read widely in Latin, Greek, French, German, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish literature. He had held a Rockefeller Post War Fellowship, 1946-1947; a Ford Fellowship, 1952-1953; and two Fulbright lectureships - in Norway, 1952-1953, and Sweden, 1955-1956.

Whicher was on the board of editors of the periodicals Studies in Romanticism and American Literature.

Achievements

• Stephen E. Whicher is best remembered for his ground-breaking intellectual biography of American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  
  As a teacher, biographer, and editor, Stephen Whicher excelled in sharing his intense interest in Emerson with others. The scholar dedicated his career to exploring the development of Emerson’s thought, and his 1953 biography of Emerson remains an important resource.
  
  Upholding the principle of organicism that Emerson espoused, Whicher’s book offers a valuable account of the evolution of one of the most daring minds in American literature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology

    (The purpose of this volume is to encourage a fresh approa...)

    1960
  • The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1

    (Famous first as a lecturer, Emerson molded his books on t...)

    1959
  • The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2 1964
  • Freedom And Fate: An Inner Life Of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1953
  • Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays 1962
  • Twelve American Poets 1961

Views

During the last months of his life, Whicher was increasingly troubled about the crisis confronted by mankind. Indifference by others bespoke human failure; concern too often revealed merely helplessness. Yet for Professor Whicher the failure was not a personal one, but generally human.

Quotations: “The purpose of a literature course is not to cover, but to uncover.”

"It is necessary for the individual in America to break decisively with the whole extremist Emersonian pattern and find some means to face this world without either transcendence or despair.”

Personality

Professor Whicher was not only outstanding in print; he was what Emerson might properly have named Man Teaching, a combination of “the scholar” and what Emerson called “character,” “a reserved force, which acts directly by the presence and without means.” Colleagues responded to him with respect and affection. Students found in him a model of intellectual and moral integrity and were led by him to find in themselves capacities for work and original thought they had not known before.

Connections

In 1940, Whicher married Elizabeth. They had four children, Susan, Nancy, Stephen and John.

Father:

George F. Whicher

Mother:

Harriet Fox Whicher

Wife:

Elizabeth Whicher

Daughter:

Susan Whicher

Daughter:

Nancy Whicher

Son:

Stephen Whicher

Son:

John Whicher

References

• American Literary Biographers, Second Series: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 111