Joan St. Clair Crane

Joan St. Clair Crane

Joan St. Clair Crane died on Sunday, May 29, 2011, at the Hospice of the Piedmont in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Miss Crane was born on November 16, 1927, in Newport, Rhode Island, the daughter of John Jarvis Crane, a career naval officer, and Imogen St. Clair Crane.

Until the late 1930's, Ms. Crane's childhood was spent in Hawaii during her father's tours of duty attached to the submarine base at Pearl Harbor, and later at other naval installations in Haiti, Panama, New London, Connecticut, Coronado, California, and Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo, California. Following Commander Crane's death in World War II, Mrs. Crane chose to remain in northern California, and Joan was sent to the Dominican Convent of San Rafael, California, from which she graduated in 1945. She subsequently attended Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

After four years at U.C. Berkeley and before graduation, Ms. Crane began a working career in the rare book trade in San Francisco. During the succeeding years, she was employed as a cataloguer of rare books and manuscripts at antiquarian book shops on the west and east coasts, eventually at the Parke-Bernet Galleries (later Sotheby's) in New York.

Her experience in the antiquarian field of rare literary materials led to employment as bibliographical cataloguer in the private library of Paul Mellon in Upperville, Virginia, during the years before the removal of the Mellon paintings, books, and manuscripts to Yale University as the nucleus of the Yale Center for British Art. While in Upperville, she compiled a descriptive catalogue of early English printed books in the Mellon collection, Fifty-five Books Printed Before 1525 Representing the Works of England's First Printers.

Ms. Crane returned briefly to the west coast to become bibliographer of rare books and manuscripts at Stanford University; thence to the University of Virginia to accept a similar position at the Alderman Library Special Collections in 1969. In 1975, she was appointed Curator of American Literature Collections, a post she held until her retirement as an associate professor in 1992.

During her tenure as curator the university's American holdings were broadly enhanced by acquisition of relevant materials for the advancement of literary scholarship. She mounted major exhibitions and published keepsakes for each. She assisted the author Mary Lee Settle in creating the PEN/Faulkner Award for American fiction, which was first presented from the University of Virginia in 1981. Her numerous scholarly articles on the Virginia Library Special Collections holdings appeared in literary and bibliographical journals. Her bibliographies of Willa Cather, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, and the post-modernist Guy Davenport are standard source works for these American writers.

After retiring from the University of Virginia library, Ms. Crane travelled to Africa, the Persian Gulf states, the Middle East, India, Nepal, Greece, Turkey, the islands of the Mediterranean and the Umbrian hill towns of Italy. This wanderlust ended with an Amazon cruise through the Brazilian tropical rain forest between Manus and Iquitos. After this last excursion she remained for the rest of her life in Charlottesville, where her home was filled with photographs and other memorabilia of the countries she visited.

Ms. Crane was a long-time communicant at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Charlottesville. She was a generous supporter of a number of charitable organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Llamda Association, and VAMOS, among others.

A memorial Mass will be celebrated at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, 1 p.m. Saturday, June 11, 2011.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Hospice of the Piedmont.


This obituary was originally published in the Daily Progress.