Robert D. Richardson III

1934 - 2020

Historian and biographer Robert Dale Richardson, III died June 16, 2020, age 86, on Cape Cod, from complications suffered after a fall. He was born in 1934 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Robert Dale Richardson, Sr. and Lucy Marsh Richardson. He grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1952. He received his A.B. in English from Harvard College in 1956 and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961. After receiving his doctorate, he taught for two years as a Fellow at Harvard. He then went to the University of Denver where he taught and wrote about American Literature for the next twenty-three years. He is best known for his three intellectual biographies, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (for which he won the Melcher Book Award in 1986); Emerson: The Mind on Fire (for which he won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Melcher Book Award in 1996); and William James: In the Maelstrom of Modernism (for which he won the Bancroft Prize in 2007). He wrote or co-wrote another ten books involving literature and writing. These three biographies, wrote John Banville in the New York Review of Books, "form one of the great achievements in contemporary American literary studies. Aside from his learning, which is prodigious, Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poets sense of nuance and a novelists grasp of dramatic rhythm; he also displays a positive genius for apt quotation, the result of a total immersion in the work of his three very dissimilar yet subtly complementary thinkers." He was an avid outdoorsman who climbed peaks in the Swiss Alps, canoed throughout the Northern United States, skied the Rocky Mountains, hiked one of the Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism, Mt. Emei in China, and for decades sailed the coast of Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces in a two-masted wooden schooner with friends and family. He was patient, kind, and a gifted teacher who was ever generous with his time. He had a dry sense of humor and loved to play folk songs on guitar and banjo. In addition to Harvard and DU, he also taught at the University of Colorado, Wesleyan, Barnard, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Queens College, the City University of New York, and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. He received research fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In recent years, he divided his time between homes on Cape Cod, Key West, and western Virginia. He is survived by his wife, Annie Dillard, two daughters, three stepchildren, brother David, niece, nephew, and three grandchildren. He will be buried in accordance with his wishes at the family plot in Concord Massachusetts, where his mother, father, and brother John already lie. A small memorial for family will occur at a time to be determined. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to Partners in Health, the Thoreau Society, or The Friends of the Free Public Concord Library.