W. V. O'Connor Bio

William Van O'Connor

1915-1966

William Van O'Connor was born on January 10, 1915 in Syracuse, New York. He earned his Bachelor's degree in 1936 and his Master's degree in 1937, both from Syracuse University, and taught at Ohio State and Louisiana State Universities before pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he earned his degree in 1947.

After teaching for nine years at the University of Minnesota, where, by the end of his stay, he had achieved the position of full professor, he moved to the University of California, Davis in 1961. From the beginning, O'Connor had been intended for the department chair and he held that position from 1962 to 1966.

Best known as a Faulkner scholar, O'Connor pursued a variety of interests in his reviews and journal articles, writing on subjects as diverse as Elizabethan figures, literary theory, and pedagogy. He also edited a number of books and supervised series of books and pamphlets, including the University of Minnesota pamphlet series. When not acting as a visiting scholar across the country and overseas, serving on a university committee, teaching a class, or researching for his next work of scholarship, O'Connor wrote plays performed or read on university campuses and his Pound play was performed off-Broadway. He also wrote short stories which were published in a variety of magazines, and in 1964 he published High Meadow, a collection of poems.

During his time at UC Davis alone, apart from his volume of poetry, O'Connor published A Key to American Literature (1962), The Grotesque (1962), a pamphlet on Ezra Pound (1963), and The New University Wits (1963), in addition to supervising several other projects. Immediately before his death, he completed a biography of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the Catholic aristocrat who was granted title to what is now much of New England. O'Connor was also known as the author of such works as Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry (1948; reissued 1963) and William Faulkner (1959) .

As a testimony of respect and mourning at his death in 1966, many of his colleagues began to donate books in his name to the department reference collection, which was then renamed in his honor. In 1967, his family gave to the department the portrait of O'Connor that still hangs in the William Van O'Connor Library today.

For a more complete biography of William Van O'Connor, please see the obituary issued by English Department members and UC Davis administrators in 1967.

Works Cited and Consulted

O'Connor, Ellen. Personal electronic communication with Marijane Osborn. 9 June 2002.

Wright, Celeste Turner. University Woman: The Memoir of Celeste Turner Wright, Professor of English,

Emeritus. Interviews by J. Richard Blanchard and Robert A. Wiggins. Oral History Center,

Shields Library, University of California, Davis. Regents of the University of California, 1981.

Wright, Celeste T[urner], Martin Oettinger, Merle L. Perkins, David H. Volman, and Robert A.

Wiggins. "William Van O'Connor, English: Davis." 1967, University of California: In Memoriam.

6 August 2002. <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:2020/dynaweb/teiproj/uchist/inmemoriam

/inmemoriam1967/@Generic__BookTextView/1162>.

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