Dr. Walter Dillon "Dillon" Johnston

1938 - 2022

Johnston, Walter Dillon ("Dillon")

October 8, 1938 - December 26, 2022

Dillon Johnston, founder in 1975 of Wake Forest University Press, and emeritus professor of English at Wake Forest University where he taught for 27 years, died December 26, 2022 at the age of 84.

Wake Forest University Press continues to be the leading publisher of Irish poetry in the United States. In a collection of tributes to Johnston's career published by the Press in 2015, The Shack, the Irish poet Michael Longley writes, "Who is more thoughtful than Dillon? He is a visionary. Many Irish poets give thanks that he so resolutely kept his head in the clouds."

Director of the Washington University Creative Writing Program from 2002 to 2005, he continued to teach courses on modern Irish literature in the English Department until his retirement in 2015. His time at Washington University the novelist Kathryn Davis has characterized as "inspired": "Dillon served the English Department as a teacher, a mentor, and-for several inspired years-as director of the MFA program. His friendships ran deep; it was on his behalf that a great many prominent Irish writers came to visit Washington University, to read from their work and to revel in the warmth of his hearth and his home. Dillon's relationship to literature was never merely scholarly but impassioned. To talk with him about a poem was to understand what poetry was on the deepest level."

Johnston authored books and essays on Irish literature and, with his wife Guinn Batten, who continues to teach at Washington University, co-authored the modern Irish poetry section for the The Cambridge History of Irish Literature. His books include Irish Poetry After Joyce, which he revised for a second edition, and The Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912-2000. In 2007, Johnston was the Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

One of four sons of Jane Dillon Johnston and Richard Boles Johnston, Walter Dillon Johnston was born Oct. 8, 1938 in Boston and grew up in Atlanta, GA with three brothers, all of whom survive him: Richard Boles Johnston, Jr. of Superior, CO; Charles Louis (Chuck) Johnston of Atlanta; and Warren Nelson Johnston of South Royalton, VT. Dillon received a full football scholarship to Vanderbilt University and earned an MA in English literature at Columbia University after serving in the Coast Guard. He earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Virginia, writing a dissertation on Victorian autobiography.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret Guinn Batten, of St. Louis, MO. He is the father of two children, Kathleen Coggan Johnston of Baltimore and Devin Dillon Johnston of St. Louis, and three grandchildren: Ethan Cole Borhani of Baltimore, and Hazel Tone Johnston and Clyde Mackenzie Johnston of St. Louis.

The family asks that donations be made to Wake Forest University Press in lieu of flowers.