Born: August 23, 1900, Valparaiso, Indiana, United States
Died: March 21, 1963, Northampton, Massachusetts, United States
Education: Harvard Univeristy
Buried: Old City Cemetery, Valparaiso, Porter County, Indiana, USA
Find A Grave Memorial# 19602976
Employer: Smith College
Books: Longfellow: his life and work, Herman Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman
Awards: National Book Award for Nonfiction, Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada
Notable queer alumni and faculty at Harvard University:
• Henry Adams (1838-1918), after his graduation from Harvard University in 1858, embarked on a grand tour of Europe, during which he also attended lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin. He was initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity as honorary member at the 1893 Columbian Exposition by Harris J. Ryan, a judge for the exhibit on electrical engineering. Through that organization, he was a member of the Irving Literary Society. In 1870, Adams was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877 at 39. As an academic historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874–1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. Among his students was Henry Cabot Lodge, who worked closely with Adams as a graduate student. On June 27, 1872, Clover Hooper and he were married in Beverly, Massachusetts, and spent their honeymoon in Europe, much of it with Charles Milnes Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, England. Upon their return, he went back to his position at Harvard, and their home at 91 Marlborough St, Boston, MA 02116, became a gathering place for a lively circle of intellectuals. Adams was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1875.
• Horatio Alger (1832-1899) passed the Harvard entrance examinations in July, 1848, and was admitted to the class of 1852. Alger's classmate Joseph Hodges Choate described Harvard at this time as "provincial and local because its scope and outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of New England; besides which it was very denominational, being held exclusively in the hands of Unitarians". Alger flowered in the highly disciplined and regimented Harvard environment, winning scholastic prizes and prestigious awards. His genteel poverty and less-than-aristocratic heritage, however, barred him from membership in the Hasty Pudding Club and the Porcellian Club. He was chosen Class Odist and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa Society honors in 1852, eighth in a class of 88. He is buried in the family plot at Glenwood Cemetery, Natick, MA 01760.
• Josep Alsop (1910-1989) graduated from the Groton School, a private boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1928, and from Harvard University in 1932. He is buried in the family mausoleum at Indian Hill Cemetery (383 Washington St, Middletown, CT 06457).
• A. Piatt Andrew (1873-1936) studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1893 to 1898, graduating with a master's degree in 1895 and a doctorate in 1900. He was instructor and assistant professor of economics at Harvard University from 1900 to 1909.
• Newton Arvin (1900-1963) studied English Literature at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1921. His writing career began when Van Wyck Brooks, the Harvard teacher he most admired, invited him to write for The Freeman while he was still an undergraduate. After a short period teaching at the high school level, Arvin joined the English faculty at Smith College and, though he never earned a doctorate, won a tenured position. One of his students was Sylvia Plath, the poet and novelist.
• John Ashbery (born 1927) graduated in 1949 with an A.B., cum laude, was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and the Signet Society.
• Vincent Astor (1891–1959) attended from 1911 to 1912, leaving school without graduating.
• Arthur Everett Austin, Jr (1900-1957) entered Harvard College in the Class of 1922. He interrupted his undergraduate career to work in Egypt and the Sudan (1922-1923) with the Harvard University/Boston Museum of Fine Arts archaeological expedition under George A. Reisner, then the leading American Egyptologist. After taking his degree in 1924, he became a graduate student in Harvard's fine arts department, where he served for three years as chief graduate assistant to Edward W. Forbes, Director of the Fogg Art Museum.
• Maud Babcock (1867-1954) was studying and teaching at Harvard University when she met noted Utahn and daughter of Brigham Young, Susa Young Gates, who, impressed by Babcock's work as a summer course instructor in physical culture, convinced her to move to Salt Lake City. She established UU's first physical training curriculum, of which speech and dramatics were part for several years.
• Lucius Beebe (1902-1966) attended both Harvard University and Yale University. During his tenure at boarding school and university, Beebe was known for his numerous pranks. One of his more outrageous stunts included an attempt at festooning J. P. Morgan's yacht Corsair III with toilet paper from a chartered airplane. His pranks were not without consequence and he proudly noted that he had the sole distinction of having been expelled from both Harvard and Yale, at the insistence, respectively, of the president and dean of each. Beebe earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1926, only to be expelled during graduate school. During and immediately after obtaining his degree from Harvard, Beebe published several books of poetry, but eventually found his true calling in journalism.
• Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) completed his studies in 1939, graduating with a B.A. cum laude
• Lem Billings (1916-1981) attended Harvard Business School from 1946 to 1948 and earned an MBA.
• John Boswell (1947-1994) received his doctorate in 1975.
• Roger Brown (1925-1997) started his career in 1952 as an instructor and then assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. In 1957 he left Harvard for an associate professorship at MIT, and became a full professor of psychology there in 1960. In 1962, he returned to Harvard as a full professor, and served as chair of the Department of Social Relations from 1967 to 1970. From 1974 until his retirement in 1994, he held the title of John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James.
• John Horne Burns (1916–1953) was the author of three novels. The first, “The Gallery” (1947), is his best known work, which was very well received when published and has been reissued several times. Burns was educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Augustine's School and then Phillips Academy, where he pursued music. He attended Harvard, where he became fluent in French, German, and Italian and wrote the book for a student musical comedy in 1936. In 1937 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in English magna cum laude and became a teacher at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. Burns wrote several novels while at Harvard and at Loomis, none of which he published. Gore Vidal reported a conversation he had with Burns following “The Gallery”'s success: “Burns was a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, wanted to be great.... He was also certain that to be a great writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed, he named a half dozen celebrated contemporaries. "A Pleiad," he roared delightedly, "of pederasts!" But what about Faulkner?, I asked, and Hemingway? He was disdainful. Who said they were any good?” He died in Florence from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 11, 1953. He was buried in the family plot in Holyhood Cemetery (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467). Ernest Hemingway later sketched Burns' brief life as a writer: "There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school and then just blew himself up."
• William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) graduated in 1936.
• Witter Bynner (1881–1968) was the first member of his class invited to join the student literary magazine, The Advocate. He was also published in another of Harvard's literary journals, The Harvard Monthly. He graduated with honors in 1902. His first book of poems, “An Ode to Harvard” (later changed to “Young Harvard”), came out in 1907. In 1911 he was the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet.
• Paul Chalfin (1874-1959) began studying at Harvard University in 1894 and left after two years to become an artist.
• Countee Cullen (1903-1946) entered in 1925, to pursue a masters in English.
• Cora Du Bois (1903-1991) accepted an appointment at Harvard University in 1954 as the second person to hold the Zimurray Chair at Radcliffe College. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. She was the first woman tenured in Harvard's Anthropology Department and the second woman tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
• Martha May Eliot (1891-1978), educated at Radcliffe College, became department chairman of child and maternal health at Harvard School of Public Health in 1956.
• Kenward Elmslie (born 1929) earned a BA at Harvard University before moving back to New York City, where he became a central figure in the New York School.
• William Morton Fullerton (1865–1952) received his Bachelor of Arts in 1886. While studying at Harvard, he and classmates began The Harvard Monthly. After his graduation and first trip to Europe in 1888, he spent several years working as a journalist in the Boston Area. In 1890, four years after his graduation from Harvard, Fullerton moved to France to begin work for The Times office in Paris.
• Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994) left graduate school in 1960 to join the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
• Julian Wood Glass, Jr, (1910-1992) attended Oklahoma schools and was graduated from Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity.
• Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958) was an American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first Woman of Colour/Interracial women to have a play publicly performed. In 1902, Grimké began teaching English at the Armstrong Manual Training School, a black school in the segregated system of the capitol. In 1916 she moved to a teaching position at the Dunbar High School for black students, renowned for its academic excellence, where one of her pupils was the future poet and playwright May Miller. During the summers, Grimké frequently took classes at Harvard University, where her father had attended law school. He was the second African American to have graduated from Harvard Law School.
• Alice Hamilton (1869–1970) was hired in 1919 as assistant professor in a new Department of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School, making her the first woman appointed to the faculty there in any field. Her appointment was hailed by the New York Tribune with the headline: "A Woman on Harvard Faculty—The Last Citadel Has Fallen—The Sex Has Come Into Its Own". Her own comment was "Yes, I am the first woman on the Harvard faculty—but not the first one who should have been appointed!" Hamilton still faced discrimination as a woman, and was excluded from social activities and ceremonies.
• Andrew Holleran (born 1944), pseudonym of Eric Garber, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, graduated from Harvard College in 1965.
• Henry James (1843–1916) attended Harvard Law School in 1862, but realized that he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge, formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the future Supreme Court Justice, and with James and Annie Fields, his first professional mentors.
• Philip Johnson (1906–2005), student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
• Frank Kameny (1925-2011) graduated with both a master's degree (1949) and doctorate (1956) in astronomy.
• Helen Keller (1880–1968) entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House.
• John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) graduated from Harvard University in June 1940.
• Alfred Kinsey (1804-1956) continued his graduate studies at Harvard University's Bussey Institute, which had one of the most highly regarded biology programs in the United States. It was there that Kinsey studied applied biology under William Morton Wheeler, a scientist who made outstanding contributions to entomology. Under Wheeler, Kinsey worked almost completely autonomously, which suited both men quite well. Kinsey chose to do his doctoral thesis on gall wasps, and began zealously collecting samples of the species. Kinsey was granted a Sc.D. degree in 1919 by Harvard University, and published several papers in 1920 under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, introducing the gall wasp to the scientific community and describing its phylogeny. Of the more than 18 million insects in the museum's collection, some 5 million are gall wasps collected by Kinsey.
• Marshall Kirk (1957-2005) was valedictorian of his high school class and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1980, majoring in psychology, and writing his honors thesis on the testing of gifted children. In 1987 Kirk partnered with Hunter Madsen (writing under the pen-name "Erastes Pill") to write an essay, "The Overhauling of Straight America." The pair developed their argument in the 1989 book "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s." The book outlined a public relations strategy for the LGBT movement.
• Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) attended Harvard, where his father, the vice-president of Filene's Department Store, had also attended, graduating in 1930. In 1927, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Kirstein was annoyed that the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate would not accept his work. With a friend Varian Fry, who met his wife Eileen through Lincoln's sister Mina, he convinced his father to finance their own literary quarterly, the Hound & Horn.
• Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954) graduated from Harvard University in 1907 with degrees in English and philosophy, and was honored as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and recipient of the prestigious Bowdoin Prize. After graduation, he was the first African-American selected as a Rhodes Scholar (and the last to be selected until 1960). At that time, Rhodes selectors did not meet candidates in person, but there is evidence that at least some selectors knew he was African-American.
• Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (born 1960) read Environmental Studies at the University of Manitoba, Landscape Architecture at Harvard University and completed his PhD in Historical Geography at University College, London. He lectures widely on landscape history and design both in Britain and abroad, is a lecturer on the MA course in Historical and Sustainable Architecture at New York University, and contributes regularly to a range of publications.
• F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) completed his M.A. in 1926 and Ph.D. degree in 1927. He returned to Harvard to begin a distinguished teaching career.
• Michael McDowell (1950-1999) received a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D in English from Brandeis University in 1978 based on a dissertation entitled "American Attitudes Toward Death, 1825-1865".
• Henry Plumer McIlhenny (1910–1986) he was graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Fine Arts in 1933. During his years at Harvard, Paul J. Sachs influenced his future collecting.
• Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), American archeologist, artifact collector, tile-maker, and designer, attended Harvard University between 1875 and 1879, obtaining a liberal arts degree.
• Francis Davis Millet (1848–1912) graduated with a Master of Arts degree. A bronze bust in Harvard University's Widener Library also memorializes Millet.
• Stewart Mitchell (1892–1957) graduated from Harvard University in 1916. He taught English literature at the University of Wisconsin. He resigned his position for political reasons, frustrated that he was forced to give a “politician’s son who should have been flunked” passing grades. Mitchell enlisted in the army, serving in France until he was discharged as a private two years later. In 1922, following two years’ study at the University of Montpellier and Jesus College, Cambridge, he returned to the States and lived with his elderly aunt in New York. Mitchell privately studied foreign language and literature, focusing on French and Greek, before returning to Harvard and graduating with a Ph.D. in Literature in 1933.
• Agnes Morgan (1879-1976) attended Radcliffe College and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1901 and her Master of Arts in 1903. In 1904 she attended George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard University.
• Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) attended with the funding made available to veterans. Published poems in the Harvard Advocate. He graduated in 1950 with a degree in English.
• Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006) studied with Walter Piston; Aaron Copland, Archibald T. Davison, and A. Tillman Merritt were also among his teachers. He completed a bachelor's degree in 1943 and a master's in 1944. He taught at various times at Simmons College (1953–1954), Boston University (1953–1954), and Harvard University (1957–1958). Among Pinkham's notable students were the jazz musician and composer Gigi Gryce (1925–1983) and the composer Mark DeVoto.
• Cole Porter (1891–1964) enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1913. At the suggestion of the dean of the law school, switched to Harvard's music faculty, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Pietro Yon.
• Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), after graduating from high school, gained her college diploma at Radcliffe College, where she focused primarily on poetry and learning writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all. In 1951, her last year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, “A Change of World,2 was selected by the senior poet W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. In 1953, Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University she met as an undergraduate. She said of the match: "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family. I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was possible." They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had three sons.
• Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) earned his bachelor's degree in architecture at Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute) in 1940 and then moved on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to study with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. After three years, he left to serve in the Navy for another three years, returning to Harvard to receive his master's in 1947
• Leverett Saltonstall (1825-1895) graduated at Harvard College in 1844; overseer of Harvard University for 18 years.
• George Santayana (1863–1952) lived in Hollis Hall as a student. He was founder and president of the Philosophical Club, a member of the literary society known as the O.K., an editor and cartoonist for The Harvard Lampoon, and co-founder of the literary journal The Harvard Monthly. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1886, Santayana studied for two years in Berlin. He then returned to Harvard to write his dissertation on Hermann Lotze and teach philosophy, becoming part of the Golden Age of the Harvard philosophy department.
• Laurence Senelick (born 1942) holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. He is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University.
• Susan Sontag (1933-2004) attended Harvard University for graduate school, initially studying literature with Perry Miller and Harry Levin before moving into philosophy and theology under Paul Tillich, Jacob Taubes, Raphael Demos and Morton White. After completing her Master of Arts in philosophy, she began doctoral research into metaphysics, ethics, Greek philosophy and Continental philosophy and theology at Harvard. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and her husband Philip Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 book “Eros and Civilization.”
• Lucy Ward Stebbins (1880-1955) was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and later transferred to Radcliffe College to receive her A.B. degree. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1902.
• Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) attended Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897.
• Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) entered thanks to a loan from Dr. Fred M. Smith, the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and father of Alice Smith.
• George Tooker (1920-2011) graduated from Harvard University with an English degree in 1942 and enlisted in the Officer Candidates School (United States Marine Corps), but was discharged for medical reasons.
• Prescott Townsend (1894–1973) graduated in 1918 from Harvard University, and attended Harvard Law School for one year.
• Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979), Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938), emigrated to America, at the invitation of Walter Gropius, to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 1938 to 1943 Tunnard taught at Harvard.
• Walter Van Rensselaer Berry (1859–1927) graduated from Harvard in 1881; he began studying law in 1883, and opened a law office specializing in international law in Washington, D.C. in 1885.
• Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928) received his B.A. in 1883.
• Harry Elkins Widener (1885-1912) was the son of George and Eleanor Widener. He lived in Elkins Park, PA. Harry studied at Hill School, a private establishment in Pottstown, PA; graduating in 1903 he left to study at Harvard (graduated 1907). Harry was a noted collector of rare books, included in his collection was a Shakespeare Folio and a Gutenberg Bible. Harry developed his bibliophilic interests while in college, when he did research among early books with coloured plates illustrating costumes for a Hasty Pudding Theatrical. In the spring of 1912, he went to England to buy books (including the second edition of Bacon's Essais, 1598) and it was while returning from this visit that he lost his life along with many of the books purchased. Harry boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg with his father and mother, George Widener's valet Edwin Keeping and Mrs Widener's maid Emily Geiger. The Widener's occupied cabins C-80-82. On the night of April 14th Harry and his parents threw a party in honour of Captain Smith which was attended by some of the most wealthy passengers on board the Titanic. Later that night Harry helped his mother into boat 4 and then stood back to await his fate, at one point he was joined by William Ernest Carter who advised him to try for a boat but Harry "I'll think I'll stick to the big ship, Billy, and take a chance." A story, never confirmed by Mrs Widener, romanticizes the death of her son. He was about to step into a lifeboat that would have saved his life when he remembered a newly acquired and unique copy of Bacon's Essais and ran back to get it. After his death the librarians turned to Mrs Widener for a donation in memory of her bibliophile son. His mother gave $2,000,000 for the construction of the building that would also house her son's collection and in 1915 the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library was dedicated. Horace Trumbauer (hon. A.M. 1915) of Philadelphia designed the library building. Harvard still pays for fresh flowers to be placed under a portrait of Widener in the chapel.
• Charlotte Wilder (1898-1980), M.A. from Radcliffe College.
Queer Places, Vol. 1.2: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World Authored by Elisa Rolle
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Yaddo, Saratoga Springs (12866)
School: Yaddo was founded by Spencer and Katrina Trask as an artist colony on their estate in Saratoga Springs. LGBTQ artists and writers, including Patricia Highsmigh, Langston Hughes, Aaron Copland, and Truman Capote spent time as artists in residence at Yaddo.
Address: 312 Union Ave, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA (43.06926, -73.758)
Phone: +1 518-584-0746
Website: www.yaddo.org
National Register of Historic Places: 13000282, 2013
Place
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400-acre (1.6 km²) estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment." It offers residencies to artists working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. Collectively, artists who have worked at Yaddo have won 66 Pulitzer Prizes, 27 MacArthur Fellowships, 61 National Book Awards, 24 National Book Critics Circle Awards, 108 Rome Prizes, 49 Whiting Writers' Awards, a Nobel Prize (Saul Bellow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976), and countless other honors. Yaddo is included in the Union Avenue Historic District. Entering its second century, Yaddo accepts contributions to its endowment and underwriting for specific projects to ensure that the artists' community will always be a place of inspiration. During the Centennial Gift Campaign, Yaddo received large contributions from Spencer Trask & Company and Kevin Kimberlin, the firm's current chairman. Novelist Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her entire estate, valued at $3 million, to the community.
Notable queer Alumni at Yaddo:
• Newton Arvin (1900-1963) became a trustee in 1939, where he was also a frequent writer in residence. There in the summer of 1946 he met and began a two-year affair with the young Truman Capote. Newton addressed him as "Precious Spooky" in amorous letters that went on to discuss literary matters.
• James Baldwin (1924-1987)
• Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
• Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
• Truman Capote (1924-1984) was accepted in the spring of 1946. He later endorsed Patricia Highsmith as a Yaddo candidate, and she wrote “Strangers on a Train” while she was there.
• John Cheever (1912-1982) wrote to Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo, in 1933: "The idea of leaving the city," he said, "has never been so distant or desirable." Ames denied his first application but offered him a place the following year. Cheever spent the summer of 1934 at Yaddo, which would serve as a second home for much of his life.
• Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
• Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) met writer Marc Brandel (the son of J.D. Beresford) during her stay in 1948 and entered into a short-lived relationship with him.
• Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
• Ned Rorem (born 1923)
• Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)
• Colm Tóibín (born 1955)
Queer Places, Vol. 1.2: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World Authored by Elisa Rolle
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School: Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college with coed graduate and certificate programs, located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters. In its 2017 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked it tied for 12th among the best National Liberal Arts Colleges.
Address: Northampton, MA 01063, USA (42.31809, -72.63723)
Phone: +1 413-584-2700
Website: www.smith.edu
Gay Village: Northampton (Hampshire County, MA 01060)
Place
Smith is also a member of the Five Colleges consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The college was chartered in 1871-1891 by a bequest of Sophia Smith and opened its doors in 1875 with 14 students and six faculty. When she inherited a fortune from her father at age 65, Smith decided that leaving her inheritance to found a women's college was the best way for her to fulfill the moral obligation she expressed in her will: "I hereby make the following provisions for the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men." The Documenting Lesbian Lives Oral History Project is a collection of life histories of women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, woman-identified-woman, queer, or who prefer not to identify with sexuality categories. The project provides a complex and nuanced collective story of American lesbian history and experience. Interviews were conducted by Smith College students in Kelly Anderson's “Documenting Lesbian Lives” course in the spring of 2010 to the present. Students were trained in both United States lesbian history and oral history techniques and protocols. Narrators include grassroots activists and political organizers, educators and academics; musicians, writers, and artists; as well as community and religious leaders. They come from a variety of class, ethnic, racial, social, and geographic backgrounds. Interviews cover childhood and growing up experiences; education and employment; activism and politics; family, identity, relationships, and community.
Notable queer alumni and faculty at Smith College:
• Alice Morgan Wright (1881-1975), a graduate of Smith College, she continued her studies in New York City. Prohibited from attending life studies at the Art Students League of New York, Wright watched local boxing and wrestling competitions in order to study the human form.
• Edith J. Goode (1881–1970), Alice Morgan Wright’s long-time companion, attended Smith College, graduating in 1904.
• Edward "Ned" Spofford (1931-2014) continued teaching literature after his termination as professor from Smith College at Stanford University. His publications include “The Social Poetry of the Georgics.”
• Elisabeth Irwin (1880–1942) attended the Packer Collegiate Institute and received her A.B. from Smith College in 1903, and her M.A. from Columbia University in 1923. She was a member of the feminist intellectual club Heterodoxy.
• Elizabeth McCausland (1899–1965) was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1899, grew up in a middle-class environment, and graduated from Smith College in 1920.
• Newton Arvin (1900–1963) joined the English faculty at Smith College and, though he never earned a doctorate, won a tenured position. One of his students was Sylvia Plath, the poet and novelist. He taught at Smith College for 38 years and was Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English during the year before his retirement in 1961. He rarely left Northampton for long nor travelled far. He visited Europe only once in the summer of 1929 or 1930. He spent a year's leave of absence in the mid-1920s as the editor of “Living Age,” a weekly compendium of articles from British and American periodicals. In 1960, the office of the United States Postmaster General (then Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield) initiated a campaign against the distribution and possession of lewd materials, including soft-core homosexually-themed pictures. At the same time, local officials in Northampton were engaged in an anti-homosexual crusade. On September 2, officers of the Massachusetts State Police arrested Arvin on pornography-related charges. The police charged Arvin with "being a lewd person" and charged both him and a Smith faculty colleague, Edward Spofford, with "possession of obscene photographs." Police said Arvin led them to Spofford and that both implicated other male faculty members. Arvin, they said, admitted "displaying the photographs at his apartment and swapping them with others." Further reports specified that the pictures were of males, later revealed as issues of Grecian Guild Pictorial and Trim: Young America’s Favorite Physique Publication containing pictures of semi-nude men. Smith College suspended Arvin from teaching, but kept him on half salary until retirement age. In 2002, Smith College established the "Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies," a student award.
• Oskar Seidlin (1911–1984) was briefly employed by the emigres Thomas Mann and Erika Mann as an amanuensis before obtaining a lecturership in German language and literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1939, and advancing to an assistant professorship in 1941. Between 1942 and 1946, he was granted an extended wartime leave from his teaching position at Smith to serve with the "Ritchie Boys" (Military Intelligence Service).
• Raymond Joel Dorius (1919–2006) left the United States after the scandal at Smith College and worked as a professor at the University of Hamburg in Germany. In 1964 he returned to the United States and taught as a professor at San Francisco State University. He died of bone marrow cancer at his home in San Francisco, California, in 2006.
• Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954) attended private secondary schools in Boston, and was graduated from the Boston Girl's Latin School in 1880. Scudder then entered Smith College, where she received her BA degree in 1884. She received the degree of LHD from Smith College in 1922.
Queer Places, Vol. 1.2: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World Authored by Elisa Rolle
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Cemetery: Newton Arvin (1900–1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual XIX-century American authors. After teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for 38 years, he was forced into retirement in 1960 after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the possession of pictures of semi-nude males that the law deemed pornographic. Arvin was also one of the first lovers of the author Truman Capote. Arvin was born in Valparaiso, Indiana. He died of pancreatic cancer in Northampton on March 21, 1963 and is buried at Union Street Cemetery, Valparaiso, IN 46383. Truman Capote established in his will the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism to be awarded "in honor of the critic Newton Arvin." It has been awarded annually since 1994 by the University of Iowa. It is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language.
Queer Places, Vol. 1.1: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ people around the World
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904 (CreateSpace-Assigned)
ISBN-10: 1532901909
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