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IN MEMORIAM
MAX WESTBROOK
Max Westbrook, professor emeritus of English,
died July 25, 2002. Max joined The University of Texas English
department in 1962, and taught literature there until his retirement
in August 1987. He continued to teach part-time and to write
correspondence course materials until he became professor emeritus
in 2000.
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Max was born in Malvern, Arkansas on April 26, 1927, and spent his childhood
years in the backwoods at an abandoned logging camp where his father
was the caretaker. The experience of growing up in the natural world
contributed to Max’s non-institutionalized sense of natural piety.
Max moved on to something closer to city life, graduating from Pine Bluff
High School. He served in the U.S. Navy during WWII, and saw active duty
in the Army during the Korean conflict. Max did his undergraduate work
at Baylor, received his MA from the University of Oklahoma, and his PhD
from The University of Texas in 1960. After teaching at the University
of Kentucky from 1960 to 1962, Max returned to The University of Texas
in 1962 as an assistant professor.
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Max’s scholarship focused on late nineteenth and twentieth century
American fiction. Especially noteworthy was his work on Hemingway, Stephen
Crane, and Western American literature. William White singled out the
bibliographical and critical essay Max co-authored with Robert Lewis
on Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as “the
outstanding textual study of a Hemingway story, long or short.” Marston
LaFrance declared in American Literary Realism (1974) that “Among
Crane’s published critics, the two best consistently have seemed
to be James B. Colvert and Max Westbrook.” Perhaps Max’s
most celebrated essay was “Grace Under Pressure: Hemingway and
the Summer of 1920,” his wittily entitled account of the strained
relations between Hemingway and his mother, Grace. When first presented
as a paper to an audience of Hemingway scholars, Max’s challenge
to the orthodox critical hostility to Grace Hemingway was met with stunned
silence. But on publication it was recognized by the distinguished Hemingway
biographer Michael Reynolds as “the most important Hemingway biographical
essay of the year,” one that related “biographical information
to the family conflicts of Hemingway’s early stories in such a
judicious way that it should become a model for scholars.”
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Of Max’s work on Western American literature, Don Graham observed
that “he is at the top of a quite small number of important critics
in the field.” Max served a term as President of the Western American
Literature Association and received its highest award, the Distinguished
Achievement in Scholarship, in 1988. Max undertook a major theoretical
project on Western literature of the kind now much celebrated, the retrieval
of marginalized discourses and writers. His essay in theoretical definition, “Conservative,
Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Literature,” so impressed
the writer, Frederick Manfred, that he stayed up all night discussing
it and then mailed Max all his novels. When Walter Van Tilburg Clark
read Max’s study of him, Clark felt that finally he had
been understood. He wrote Max that his critique “relieved me a
great deal and encouraged me toward writing again.” Warren French
noted in American Literary Studies, An Annual, 1973 “that
only a brave or foolhardy person would undertake a new survey of Walter
van Tilburg Clark’s fiction in the wake of Max Westbrook’s
noteworthy study.” Max’s critiques could also be severe,
as in his persuasive moral analyses of the dishonest political implications
of John Ford’s film Fort Apache, and of John Wayne’s
screen persona.
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As a teacher, Max was a lifelong influence on some of his students. He
also served the University as an effective administrator, becoming assistant
and then associate dean of the College of Humanities from 1971 to 1974.
He served six years as chair of the English department Graduate Studies
Committee, establishing new graduate specializations in rhetoric, linguistics,
and folklore. His administrative work attracted the attention of other
institutions, which extended offers to him that he refused.
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In later years Max turned to the writing of chapbooks of poetry and fiction,
always in his unmistakable personal voice. Perhaps the most notable of
these were his fine poetry collection, Country Boy and his entertainingly
wry take on academia, For Whom the Bell Rings. Max’s poetry
reflects his love for his wife, Frankie, and his children, Lynn, Brett,
and Max Jr. Brett’s obituary remembrance conveys the interrelation
of Max’s literary and family life perfectly: “Papa would
take us children out for walks on Sundays and talk to us about or read
to us from Emerson and Thoreau. I knew what an oversoul was before I
was seven years old.”
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner,
President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin,
Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting
of Professors Anthony Hilfer (Chair), Don Graham, and Joseph Moldenhauer.
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