a 1955 quote by a recently-resigned UVM professor,
John W. Aldridge
Wake Robin collected some books about Vermont and set them on a table in the vestibule. Pasted to the inside jacket of a picture book published in 1941, 'Vermont Is Where You Find It', was this delicious quote from a UVM professor who knew how to criticize:
Various accounts describe how Aldridge went on to be one of the great social and literary critics of his day.
Who else could take on Hawthorn, panning The Old Man and the Sea?
I confess that I am unable to share in the prevailing wild enthusiasm for this new book of Hemingway's, "The Old Man and the Sea." I have come to this conclusion after noticing, first of all, that the style of the book, in spite of its
antiseptic clarity and restraint, is oddly colorless and flat, as if there were nothing sufficiently strong
within its subject to resist it at any point and provoke it into fully alert dramatic life.
Read his review here
(The Virginia Quarterly Review)
John W. Aldridge, Emeritus Professor of English, passed away in Madison, Georgia,
on February 7, 2007. He retired from active faculty status as of December 31, 1990,
after a highly productive career as teacher and scholar. John Aldridge studied at the
University of Chattanooga in his native Tennessee from 1940 to 1943; he was graduated
from the University of California at Berkeley in 1947. His service in the Second World was
distinguished; an Infantry Rifleman and Information Specialist, he was decorated with the
Bronze Star Medal and five bronze combat stars for Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland,
Central Europe, and the Ardennes.....
University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
I heard John Aldridge speak only once. It was in 1956, during the spring of my freshman year in college, when he delivered a major address on the role of the writer in the university at an American literature conference held at Bowdoin.
Read the account on the blog of Peter Anastas.