Jacob Clavner Levenson

Jacob Clavner Levenson, Edgar Allan Poe Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, died peacefully in his home on Monday, September 3, 2018. He was surrounded by his family. Jack was born on October 1, 1922, in Boston, Mass., the son of Joseph Mayer and Frances Anna Hahn Levenson. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he wrote a prize-winning honors thesis on the novels of Henry James. Immediately after early graduation in January 1943, he entered the U.S. Army, where he rose to be the chief noncom of the signal construction group of Advance Section, Communications Zone. In the course of service from Omaha Beach to central Germany, he was awarded five battle stars, and the Bronze Star Medal for his service during the Battle of the Bulge. Early in the training phase of his Army career, he spent several months in Chicago at the Army Air Force radio school, and while there he met Charlotte Elizabeth Getz. In the two years of vigorous correspondence that followed, friendship gradually deepened into mutual love. When he returned to the United States they became engaged, and they married on D-Day plus two years, on June 6, 1946. On the troopship that brought him back to the United States, Jack read the paperback Armed Services edition of The Education of Henry Adams. The questions it raised about American history and politics and social fragmentation turned him from his plan to follow his father's profession of the law and to enroll in the Harvard Ph.D. program in the History of American Civilization. As a graduate student in the post-war burgeoning of American Studies, he studied with the leading lights of the field, including Perry Miller and especially F.O. Matthiessen. He completed a dissertation on Henry Adams, which formed the backbone for his subsequent book, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams, published in 1957. In 1947 and again in 1949, Jack returned to Europe, serving as F.O. Matthiessen's assistant for the first session of what is now known as the Salzburg Global Seminar, then officially called "The Harvard Student Council's Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization." Jack and Charlotte long cherished their memories of those sessions, which brought together men and women from eighteen countries, including countries behind the Iron Curtain. Jack began his teaching career as a Tutor, and later was a visiting Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard. He then served as an Instructor at the University of Connecticut. In 1954, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota where he was promoted to full Professor in 1960. He left Minnesota in 1967 to assume the Edgar Allan Poe Endowed Chair in the English Department of the University of Virginia. From 1971 to 1974, he served a term as Chairman of the English Department and he continued teaching at the University until his retirement in 1997. His teaching interests included American novels of the 19th and 20th centuries and 20th Century American poetry. Among the professional honors he received were the Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Counsel of Learned Societies Fellowship, each of which brought him and his family to England for a year. He received the Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1966. Jack's scholarly work focused on major American literary figures; he wrote introductions for scholarly editions of works by Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, and edited a widely used anthology of American Literature for college teaching. In collaboration with Ernest Samuels, Viola Hopkins Winner, and Charles Vandersee (with the assistance of Jayne Samuels and Eleanor Abbot) he edited the definitive six volume edition of the Letters of Henry Adams, which was published by the Belknap Harvard Press between 1982 and 1988. Jack was a member of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville and served a term as its president. He was also a member of the Society of Fellows of the University of Virginia. Jack loved to travel with Charlotte and was delighted when he was invited to serve as a visiting reviewer and lecturer in such far-flung locales as Nigeria and South Korea. Following Charlotte's death in 2015, he continued to travel with his children and grandchildren. Jack is survived by his three children, Anne Brown of Anchorage, Alaska, Jill Eisenberg of Minnetonka, Minnesota, and Paul Levenson of Lexington, Massachusetts; and by his six beloved grandchildren, Samuel and William Eisenberg, Elizabeth Brown, and Isabel, Felix and Henry Levenson. A memorial service will be held at Congregation Beth Israel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, September 5, 2018. In Jack's memory donations may be made to the Charlotte Getz Levenson Odyssey Scholarship Fund at the College of the University of Chicago, the Charlottesville Virginia Chamber Music Festival, www.cvillechambermusic.org/support.html, or the University of Virginia Tuesday Evening Concert Series.