Larzer Ziff, renowned scholar of American literature, dies at 97

Larzer Ziff, a globally renowned scholar of American literary culture and intellectual history and an inspirational mentor, died Nov. 25. Ziff, a professor emeritus and research professor in the Department of English, was 97.

In his widely influential scholarship, Ziff focused on the material, social, and political circumstances that both shape literary production and are affected by it. He investigated the Puritan period, the age of Emerson, the American fin-de-siècle, and the emergence of travel writing.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation

"Larry Ziff was a prodigious scholar of 18th- and 19th-century American literature," said Sharon Cameron, professor emerita in the Department of English. Cameron described him as "a beloved undergraduate teacher whose large lecture course on the sweep of American literature introduced students to the thrall of the humanities, a dynamic mentor to graduate students whose careers he helped launch, an unstinting colleague, and an extremely affable person, like the character described by Henry James who 'was not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in the corner of it ... He was squarely encamped in the center and he was keeping open house.'"

As author or editor of some seven volumes and dozens of articles, Ziff explored the relationship between great writers and their social milieux, analyzing works within their cultural and historical contexts. In The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation, he asserted that several lesser-known writers of the 1890s were thwarted by the prevailing standards of morality and artistic expression. Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World explored the intersections between economic, political, intellectual, and social structure in Puritan America. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America delved into such classic American writers as Hawthorne and Melville against a backdrop of the mid-19th century wave of democratic nationalism. The deeply researched Mark Twain placed the author's familiar and lesser-known works within the literary cultures and works of his time.

"I was one of many candidates for the doctorate who had the good fortune early in our careers to be initiated by Larzer Ziff into an extended and expansive conversation about the history of American literary culture that turned out to be formative of our work through graduate school and beyond it," said Michael Moon, A&S '89 (PhD), emeritus professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and former faculty in Johns Hopkins' Department of English.

Meredith McGill, A&S '94 (PhD), now professor of English at Rutgers University, said she always appreciated Ziff's curiosity and how much it allowed her to learn from him. "The breadth of his knowledge was staggering, particularly to a young person, and I admired the generosity of his approach to American literature and culture," she said. "He taught a memorable class on the American Renaissance the year that David Reynolds' study came out, championing 'subversive' books while at the same time keeping them firmly 'beneath' the canon of American literature. But Larry never condescended to these works. I remember being gobsmacked by Lippard's Quaker City and Larry's delight in texts like this. He was a great teacher."

A native of Massachusetts, Ziff attended Middlebury College and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago in 1951 and 1955, respectively. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1956 to 1973, the University of Oxford from 1973 to 1978, and the University of Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1981. Ziff arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1981, where he chaired the English Department from 1991 to 1995. He retired in 1999.

A steady hand as chair known for rising above departmental frays, Ziff was admired for an intelligence and depth of knowledge rivaled only by his modesty. His good humor and ability to illustrate ideas with anecdotes eased the way for those around him. His generosity with graduate students as they found their own path helped many learn to see themselves as the scholars they would become, and to become mentors themselves.

"Soon after I arrived at Hopkins, a seminar I took with Larry Ziff yielded my first conference paper, my first published article, and my dissertation topic," said Elizabeth Renker, A&S '89 (MA), '91 (PhD), now professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. "At the time, I couldn't imagine such trajectories on my own, but Larry was there as mentor, steering me in his steadily kind and good-humored way, showing me what my thinking might become. I was so lucky to work with him across my doctoral years."

"Larry was unfailingly kind and generous with me," added Michael Warner, A&S '85 (PhD), now a professor of English and American studies at Yale. "I saw, the more we talked, how deeply read he was in all periods of American lit, from John Cotton to Philip Roth, though he never made a fuss about it. He seemed to have an anecdote or a joke about everything. And he never seemed to mind that the work I was doing was going in a direction he would not have traveled; he just gave me timely leads and suggestions and let me follow my own path. I have looked back on this often in the years since then, and the generosity he showed remains an ideal for being a graduate teacher."

Ziff was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Antiquarian Society, American Philosophical Society, and Society of American Historians. He was a fellow of the Huntington Library, American Council of Learned Societies, Newberry Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Woodrow Wilson Center.

He was a Ford Foundation lecturer at the Universities of Poland; a Fulbright visiting professor at the universities of Copenhagen, Warsaw, and Sussex; winner of the Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa Society; and a National Book Award nominee. He was a member of the Yaddo Colony in 1979.

Stanley Fish, presidential scholar in residence at New College of Florida, describes himself as lucky to have twice been a member of a department where Ziff was "a senior and stabilizing presence."

"When I was an instructor at Berkeley, Larry had already established himself as a promising Americanist and as someone who could be trusted to perform an administrative assignment with wisdom, efficiency and the saving grace of humor," Fish said. "Later we were colleagues at Johns Hopkins, and while we were equals in rank, I always thought of Larry as my superior, in several senses of that word. Larry was too generous a person to be drawn into any context of quarrel; he was the one you could talk to in the confidence that your complaints and anxieties would be heard with patience and understanding. Larry was the perfect colleague because he was not a prima donna, although his long list of accomplishments and honors would have justified his being one. There are too few like him."

"When I returned to Hopkins, Larry had retired," said Eric Sundquist, professor emeritus in the Department of English. "At lunches or in hallway conversations I enjoyed his keen intelligence and geniality, as well as—perhaps especially—his gray (not exactly dark) sense of humor. I often left these exchanges a little happier."

Ziff served on the California Teachers' Professional Standards Commission and Committee for an English Framework of State of California Board of Education; American Studies Advisory Committee on the International Exchange of Persons; and the United States-United Kingdom Educational Commission, and was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare on the provisions of Higher Education Act of 1966.

He chaired the Modern Language Association's Literature and Society group and the English Institute's Criticism and History section. He was a member of the editorial boards of ELH, American Quarterly, the Modern Language Review and Yearbook of English Studies, PMLA, and William and Mary Quarterly.