- Douglas Day
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Douglas Day 
Day in 1999 on the border between Venezuela and Brazil (Sheila McMillen 1999)Born May 1, 1932
PanamaDied October 10, 2004 (aged 72)
VirginiaOccupation Novelist, Biographer, Critic, Professor of English Douglas Day (1 May 1932-10 October 2004) was a novelist, biographer, and critic.
Day won a National Book Award (1974) for his life of English novelist Malcolm Lowry. Malcolm Lowry: A Biography documents the turbulent life of the alcoholic writer best known for his 1947 novel "Under the Volcano." Day was also the editor, with Lowry's widow, Margerie, of Lowry's posthumous novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968). In 1973 Day was editor of a new and definitive edition of William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust (originally published as Sartoris). He had studied under Faulkner in graduate school when William Faulkner was a visiting lecturer at University of Virginia.
Other books by Douglas Day include Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves (1963) and two novels, Journey of the Wolf (1977), for which Day received the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon (1991).
Day taught English, writing, and comparative literature at the University of Virginia for 38 years and was director of their Creative Writing Program when he retired. As beloved by students for his flamboyant lifestyle as for his lectures, Day was a romantic figure on campus. He drove fast sports cars, walked with a limp from a mysterious leg injury, married often, and was so handsome he was once asked to model in a car advertisement. He was fluent in Spanish and spent much of his life in Spain and Latin America. One of his many areas of expertise was contemporary Hispanic and Latin American literature.
He had received grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the J. William Fulbright organization. He had a Fulbright lectureship, funded by Intercambio Cultural, at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain. In 1995, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (Sullivan).
An undergraduate of Professor Day's, John T. Casteen III, who later became President of the University of Virginia, said of Day, "Through it all, he was a brilliant companion and raconteur. He could talk about flying and Porsches and photography and ways of thinking with a facility and freshness of perspective that always left me or us with a wealth of things to ponder and to return to later—and he did this always with kindness and wit" (Bromley). One of his former graduate students, playwright Alex Finlayson said, "Unlike other professors, Doug Day never seemed overly worried about his academic reputation or conforming to departmental standards. He tended to live as he pleased, with gusto, and we loved him for that."
Douglas Turner Day III was born in Colón, Panama, where his father was an officer in the United States Navy.He served as a U.S. Marine Corps pilot. He received three degrees at the University of Virginia before joining the English faculty there in 1962. Living to the end like the contemporary fictional heroes he brought to life for thousands of students, Day died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on October 10, 2004, in Charlottesville. He had suffered a debilitating stroke a few months earlier.
References
- Bromley, Anne. "The Adventure Ends for Writer and English Professor Douglas Day." Inside UVA Online. Oct 29-Nov 11 2004.
- Day, Douglas. Journey of the Wolf. New York: Atheneum, 1977. ISBN 0689107714
- Day, Douglas. Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ISBN 0195017110
- Day, Douglas. The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. online
- Day, Douglas. The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. ISBN 0151745986
- Fox, Margalit. "Douglas Day, 72, Malcolm Lowry Biographer is Dead." New York Times, 19 October 2004.
- Sullivan, Patricia. "Douglas T. Day III; Writer, Educator." The Washington Post, 16 October 2004.[1]
External links
Categories:- 1932 births
- 2004 deaths
- American biographers
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