Percy G. Adams

ADAMS, PERCY G. - Lindsay Young Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Tennessee, died Friday, October 10, 2008, in Athens, Georgia at the age of 93 after a long career as educator and writer.
A native of south Texas, Dr. Adams was reared by a widowed mother, graduated from high school at age 15 and, at age 18, received his A.B. in mathematics and chemistry from Texas A&I, which he attended on an Eagle Scouts' scholarship and where he lettered at age 18 in both basketball and tennis. Following his graduation from Texas A&I, he taught math and English in south Texas high schools for seven years while also serving as a basketball and tennis coach. During his summers off from teaching high school, Dr. Adams attended the University of Texas, from which he received his M.A. in English and French in 1937. In 1940, he began full-time work on his Doctorate at that same university and, while there, met and married Pauline (Polly) Serger in 1941. His graduate education was temporarily interrupted by the World War II, during which he served for three years as an air navigator in the U.S. Navy before being discharged as a Lieutenant. After completing his Ph.D in 1946, Dr. Adams began his university teaching career at Ohio State University before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee (UT) in 1948. Eighteen years later, he and Polly left Tennessee for four years while he served as the Director of Graduate Studies in English at LSU and as the editor of its Humanities Series. In 1970, however, they chose to return to their beloved UT where, for many years, Professor Adams served as chairman of the University's Committee on Student English and directed the Junior English Examination then required of all UT graduates, while also teaching 18th-century literature, comparative literature and composition, including freshman composition, a course which he believed all advanced professors of English should continue to teach at least occasionally. During this second tenure at UT, Dr. Adams also served as its Director of Graduate Studies in English from 1976 to 1984, was designated the Chancellor's Research Scholar in 1977 and, in 1980, was named Lindsay Young Professor. He retired from teaching in 1985. Although he always considered himself primarily a classroom teacher, Professor Adams was awarded numerous honors for his writing, received many research grants and published widely. He studied the French language and comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1952-53, was Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble in France in 1958 and 1959 and was the founding president of the Southeast American Society for 18th-Century Studies in 1974. Among his many honors and research grants were two fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, five grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and, in 1973, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. With these and other grants he was able to research and write at a number of great libraries, among them the Huntington in California, the Newberry in Chicago, Duke University, Yale University, the British Library in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Best known perhaps as an authority on travel writing, Dr. Adams also published on fiction, poetry and drama. He was the author, editor or translator of over twenty volumes, several of which were widely reviewed, including his translation of St. John de Crevecoeur's last work, Travels in the State of New York and Upper Pennsylvania (1961), and his books, Travelers and Travel Liars (1962, reprinted in 1978), Graces of Harmony (1977) and Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983). After retiring, he continued to lecture and write, for example, publishing Travel Literature through the Ages in 1988 and delivering the chief address at a conference on Portuguese travel literature in Lisbon, Portugal in 1989. What Professor Adams was most proud of professionally, however, were the accomplishments of some of his 7,000 to 8,000 former students, many of whom went on to become renowned scholars, writers and teachers themselves. In addition to being survived by his wife, Polly, former head of the French Department at Webb School of Knoxville and English instructor at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Adams is survived by two of their three children, Dr. Richard (Dick) P. Adams of Watkinsville, GA (and his wife Kathy and their son Nathan) and Elise M. Adams of New York, NY (and her husband Mark Behrman and step-children, Jake and Shelby). His eldest daughter, Andrea J. Adams, predeceased Dr. Adams in 2005. A memorial service for Dr. Adams will be held in Knoxville, TN at the Messiah Lutheran Church at 6900 Kingston Pike at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 15, followed by the placement of his ashes in Messiah's columbarium.