M. H. Abrams papers

Meyer Howard "Mike" Abrams was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on July 23, 1912, in a Jewish-American middle-class family. He went to Harvard where he majored in English literature -- though, interestingly, the Harvard Album for 1934 mentions "law" as his "avocation". Fellow-students included future New York Times foreign affairs columnist Cyrus L. Sulzberger (1913-93) and future historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004). This is also in Harvard that Abrams met his wife of 71 years, Ruth Claire Gaynes (1917-2008), with whom he would have two children. His first book -- a revised version of his senior's thesis -- was published in 1934 (and reprinted in 1970): "The Milk of Paradise" was about "four eminent English authors [who] were addicted to opium": Coleridge, Crabbe, de Quincey, and Francis Thompson. Young Abrams claimed that "a knowledge of the opium world is essential to complete understanding of their work." After one year at the university of Cambridge as a Henry Fellow, he returned to the United States, but "because there weren't jobs anywhere [during the Great Depression], [he] decided to stay on as a graduate student at Harvard." During World War II he conducted classified research at Harvard's Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory, helping the military solve problems in voice communications by developing highly audible military codes and tests to select personnel with the ability to recognize sounds in a very noisy background. He came to Cornell in 1945 as an assistant professor in the English Department, and was promoted associate professor in 1947 and full professor in 1953. In 1960 he became the first Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and in 1973 succeeded to the Class of 1916 Professorship until his retirement in 1983. Among his students over the years were literary critics Harold Bloom '51; E.D. Hirsch '50; and novelist Thomas Pynchon '59. Abrams continued to lecture at Cornell and remained a visible and active participant in campus life, giving the keynote lecture at a 2005 James Joyce conference as well as public talks on English poetry in 2008 and 2010, and also attending English department events and Big Red football games. In addition to his service at Cornell, he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Malta (1953), a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioural Sciences at Stanford (1967-88), a Visiting Fellow at all Souls College, Oxford University (1977), a member of the Founders' Group of the National Humanities Center, and was named Chairman of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress in 1984. "The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition" (1953) was cited in 1957 in a poll of 250 literary critics and scholars as one of the "five works published the last thirty years which... have contributed the most to an understanding of literature." Also in the late 1950s, Abrams was approached by the W.W. Norton Company about compiling "a definitive anthology of English literature". The resulting book sold millions of copies, and remains an enduring reference for high school and college students. Abrams was general editor of the "Norton Anthology" through seven editions from 1962 to 2000. His other books include “Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature” (1971) ; "The Glossary of Literary Terms," first published in 1957; and "Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays" (1972). In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal "for broadening the study of literature." Mike Abrams died in Ithaca on April 21, 2015.