Edward Wagenknecht

Edward Wagenknecht, Author and Critic, at 104, died Monday morning, May 24, 2004, in the Northwestern Medical Center following a brief illness.

St.Albans, VT-- May 24. Edward Wagenknecht was born in Chicago on March 28, 1900 and grew up in the city and its suburb of Oak Park, where he graduated from high school with the future novelist Ernest Hemingway. He continued his education at the University of Chicago, completing it with a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Washington in Seattle. While in Seattle he met his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1932. They spent over sixty years together until her death in Newton, Massachusetts in 1993. They had three sons: Robert of Petersburg, Virginia, David of Newton, Massachusetts, and Walter of Fairfax, Vermont.

Wagenknecht had a long career in college teaching, starting at the University of Chicago, and continuing at the University of Washington, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Boston University (1947-1968). During his years of teaching, and for thirty years after, he spent most of his free time writing. He contributed countless book reviews to newspapers, including the Boston Herald, New York Times, and Chicago Tribune.

He published about seventy books, a few of them anthologies, but most of them full-length studies of famous English or American authors, beginning with Charles Dickens (1929) and Mark Twain (1935). His collection THE FIRESIDE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS STORIES (1945) was a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection. His interests were not limited to adult writers. As a child, his first literary interest was THE WIZARD OF OZ and its sequels by L. Frank Baum. Wagenknecht celebrated his life-long love of that author in the first critical study of Baum, UTOPIA AMERICANA, a pamphlet that is now a collector's item among OZ fans. Most of his personal papers, scrapbooks, and manuscripts are housed in the Special Collections at the Mugar Library at Boston University.

He also loved theater and music, including opera. He conducted an extensive correspondence that led to personal friendships with a number of public figures from literature and the performing arts. His large collection of letters from Metropolitan opera star Geraldine Farrar(Caruso's favorite leading lady) are currently housed at The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, while his collection of 78 RPM recordings of early singers was donated to the Boston Public Library.

He was a particular friend as well of silent screen stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish and Mary Pickford. In fact, Pickford served as godmother to his firstborn, Robert. And his history of the silent film, MOVIES IN THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1962), is still considered a classic in the field by an author who personally watched the original movies when they were a new and exciting addition to American culture.

He also wrote a biography in honor of the centennial of Theodore Roosevelt, and histories of the English and American novel and of his native Chicago and his adopted New England.

He is survived by sons Robert and wife Therese, David and wife Patricia, and Walter and wife Elizabeth, six grandsons and one granddaughter, and two great granddaughters.

Arrangements are private. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Dorothy Wagenknecht Fund at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115-5523, which was established in 1993 to honor his wife's long years of service introducing school children to the world of art.

Online Condolences may be sent to his family by going to the Brady & Levesque Funeral Home web site: www.bfllfh.ccin. or to the Funeral Home, 86 South Main St. St.Albans, Vt. 05478.