Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 - November 24, 2003) was a professor of English and literary critic. He had a wide range of interests, but is best known for his writings on Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and on Irish literature.

Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario; his father was a classics professor. He attributed his interest in literature to his poor hearing, caused by a bout of influenza during his childhood.

His first teaching post was at Santa Barbara College; he then taught at Johns Hopkins University (from 1973 to 1990) and the University of Georgia (from 1990 to 1999).

One of his strongest influences was Marshall McLuhan, who wrote the introduction to Kenner's first book Paradox in Chesterton. Kenner's PhD dissertation at Yale, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was dedicated to McLuhan. (Pound, who became a friend of Kenner's, had suggested the thesis be titled The Rose in the Steel Dust.) Kenner recently said of McLuhan "I had the advantage of being exposed to Marshall when he was at his most creative, and then of getting to the far end of the continent shortly afterward, when he couldn't get me on the phone all the time. He could be awfully controlling."

Kenner's books included:

• Paradox in Chesterton (1947), about G. K. Chesterton
• The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951)
• Dublin's Joyce (1956)
• The Pound Era (1971), probably the best known of his works
• Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973)
• Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976)
• Joyce's Voices (1978)
• Ulysses (1980)
• A Colder Eye (1989), a commentary on Irish writing
• Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings (1994) about the animator Chuck Jones.
• The Elsewhere Community (2000) ISBN 0887846076

He was married twice: his first wife, Mary Waite, died in 1964; the couple had three daughters and two sons. His second wife, who he married in 1965, was Mary-Anne Bittner; they had a son and a daughter.

External Links

• National Post article
• Washington Post obituary