Interview with
CARROLL EDWARDS

Conducted by
Calder M. Pickett
Oral History Project
K.U. Retirees' Club
University of Kansas
July 9, 1991

A. C. EDWARDS

A. B., Southwestern, 1933
A. M., Iowa, 1938
Ph.D., Iowa, 1949
Service at Kansas
Associate Professor, 1947-1949
Professor, 1959-1981
Professor Emeritus, 1981

Edwards 1
Q:

This is May 15, 1991, and I am Calder Pickett, and this

is going to be an interview with Carroll Edwards, who retired a
number of years ago after a long career here in the English
department at the University of Kansas.

I have not known Carroll

well myself in a personal way, but I always feel that I have
because his wife and my wife have been playing bridge together in
the same group for I think it must be more than 30 years now; I'm
pretty sure it goes back into the 1950s, which means that I have
always known about the Edwards family and some of the things
they've been doing and so on.

Carroll, I'm going to start you at

the beginning, in a way the same way that David Copperfield
begins, and ask you to talk a little bit about your childhood,
your date of birth, and where you were born, who your parents
were--a little bit about them, and a little bit about your
family, if you had any brothers and sisters and so on, and then
we will move up into recent times.
A.

You want me to start out with my birth time.

I was born

in Davenport, Oklahoma, 1909, a long time ago, on a farm.

There

were seven of us in the family and I had a sister who got
tuberculosis, and in that day tuberculosis was ordinarily fatal.
So my mother had heard that if you moved out West, the climate
would help.

So we moved out West to Colorado--homestead, in

Eastern Colorado.

My father, who knew nothing whatever about

land in the West, homesteaded on 160 acres.

I had two sisters

who were mature, and they also filed claim to 160 acres.

But in

Colorado on that land, you need about 20,000 acres to make a

Edwards 2
living, so we didn't stay there very long.
interesting experiences.
frontier days.

We had some

We were there at the very end of

There were still a great many wild animals.

There were a lot of deer, and the nearest store was eight miles,
and it was just a station on the river.

away.

Q.

What town were you near?

A.

Trinidad, Colorado.

Q.

Down there in the southeast?

A.

That's right.

Trinidad, Colorado, which was 70 miles

And so my father hired a boxcar at Davenport, Oklahoma and

rode with all the stock out to Thatcher, Colorado, and then we
drove the cattle over eight miles to the homestead.

We built an

adobe house.

This was the standard material for edifices in

those days.

We built an adobe house, but showing his lack of

knowledge for the way you build an adobe house, he built a two­
story adobe house.

Nobody ever built a two-story adobe house.

We had a dirt floor for the kitchen, and that wasn't quite as bad
as it might seem to you, because that dirt gets hard as concrete
and you sweep it out with a broom just like you would with
concrete.

Well, we stayed there, and I have some [good] memories

of the seven months that we were out there.

We lived in a tent

at first, and there were rattlesnakes to avoid when we had to go
out and drive the cattle in at night.

There were rattlesnakes

galore, and one of our neighbor homesteaders had a cigar box full
of rattles he had taken from rattlers.

We stayed there until the

fall but there was no school at all, the nearest school was at

Edwards 3
Trinidad, so my mother decided that we would move into Trinidad
so that we could go to school.

We had a covered wagon--it must

have been one of the last of the covered wagons--and drove it the
70 miles to get us to Trinidad with all the stock.

After we

moved into Trinidad, I went to school there through the eighth
grade--a public school.

You can't play hooky when I went to the

ninth grade in Trinidad, and my mother, who had an Ulster
Protestant's notion of Catholicism (among other things) assumed
that Catholics were strict, and she sent me to the Catholic
school there.

I enrolled in the Catholic school, and had a very

fine experience with the Catholics.
Q.

Did you have good teachers?

A.

Real fine.

There were dedicated nuns, really dedicated,

and their whole life was their students and their religion, and
that was it.

They wore the seventeenth-century costumes of the

Sisters of Charity--the black gowns that go down to the ground.
I went there for four years, played basketball, and then decided
to go on to college.

I wrote around and finally decided to go to

Southwestern College in southern Kansas, so we drove down in a
Model T.
Q.

What town was that?

A.

That's Winfield, Kansas.

Q.

Down there by Wichita?

A.

Yes, south of Wichita, north of Kansas City.

I had four

years at Southwestern, and a couple years after I graduated from
Southwestern I wanted to read more poetry, so I wrote to Iowa and

Edwards 4
I

asked about attending graduate school there and was accepted.

went four years to Iowa, got a Ph.D. in English, and that's the
extent of my education.
Q.

Carroll, you said you got interested in poetry.

Do you

have any feeling or idea about what it was that got you started
in being interested in literature?

Did you have many books in

your home?
A.

That was it.

We were very poor when I was a kid, but my
No

mother was absolutely obsessed with the notion of education.

matter how little money we had, she always had money for books of
poetry and Comron's Picture Encyclopedia for us to read, and
encouraged us to read.

We had a lot of books of poetry around

the house, and she liked it too.

In those days there was a lot

more memorization than there is these days, and my mother had
memorized a lot of poetry such as Byron's poem on Waterloo:

"It

is, it is the cannon's opening roar"--and my mother would recite
it.
Q.

11

st. Agnes Eve"--"how bitter chill it was."

one I remember I memorized at one time.
A.

Yes, that's one we always read.

That's the

"Vision of Sir Launfal."
I continued that

interest and finally got a Ph.D. in it, and then got a job at
Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.
Q.

About when was this?

A.

This was about 1940, when I went to Stillwater.

Q.

Did the Depression years hit you in any significant way?

Edwards 5
A.
thing.

Yes--well, they hit everybody.

You can't communicate that spirit of Depression to people

who've never experienced it.
to it.

That's the strangest

The thing is, you could see no end

Now you read this pablum in the newspaper:

recession is bound to be short-lived."

"This

Well, this one went on

year after year and you could see no end to it, and it looked as
if life was going to be like that.

You were on the razor's edge

between having enough food to eat, not just deprived of some
You had to struggle.

luxuries.

get enough money to pay the rent.

You had to struggle in order to
There simply was no work.

just could not get hold of any money.
some good aspects to it.

You

On the other hand, it had

I think it kind of solidifies the

family because you spend more time at home, and in those days the
girls were always taught to play the piano, so you could stand
around the piano and sing songs.

We weren't the consumers then

like people are now, the consumer ideal that you see that has
apparently taken possession of the whole world.
world wants to be middle-class.

Everybody in the

I think that we were above that

in the Depression, and we had more solid tastes.
Q.

Of course it wouldn't have been this way in the big

city, but in the smaller towns we had vegetable gardens, raising
many of the things we ate, and kids got out and got jobs, and
this was something that you had to do.
had a job.
in 1940?

I think everybody I knew

1940--my gosh, that was a long time ago.
And you went from there to Oklahoma State.

Virgie enter the story for you?

Your Ph.D.
When does

Edwards 6
A.
Iowa.

Virgie enters the story when I went to the University of

We were both enrolled in Old English, met each other, and

that's what started the whole thing.
Q.

Where was she from?

A.

She was from Illinois, near Peoria.

But we both liked

poetry and we both liked literature, so this was a sort of bond
between us.
Q.

Were there any teachers you had there that stand out in

your memory?
A.

Yes, I think it would be a pretty poor student that

didn't have teachers that stood out in his memory.

I think we

all remember our--well, I don't like to say favorite teacher, but
we like to remember teachers that had some influence on us.

One was Henig Larson, a Norwegian who had come

had two of them.

over and who taught Old English.

He was a demanding sort of guy,

great big, and absolutely formal in his Old English class.
there was E. N.

We

s.

Then

Thompson, who was a Milton specialist, and

there were others that you remember.

I had a good experience at

Iowa, very pleasant, and I learned something.
Q.

How did you find your way into Old English?

Isn't that

a rather esoteric [field]?
A.

Well, it didn't used to be.

It would be now, but at

that time, if you were going to get your M.A. and your Ph.D., you
had to take either Greek, Old English, or Latin, so Virgie and I
decided we would take [Old English].
knowledge of it.

We had to have a reading

Edwards 7
Q.

That is another language.

A.

A tough foreign language.

Q.

When I was looking at your stuff here, I guess I should

have known, but I didn't know Chaucer was your specialty.
Chaucer was about the only English class I didn't take when I was
in college.

It just seemed it would be too tough.

I didn't have

an English major, but I would have had I taken Chaucer.
A.

There used to be figures in English that it was de

rigueur for you to take.

If you were going to major in English,

you had to take those figures.

They were standard.

They were

required, you had to take these figures, but that's loosening
now, and you have a lot more emphasis on diversity.
Q.

I (heard] that there's some basic things that people

should take, and I think in English that there are some things
that everybody should have.
A.

The thing of it is, what bears down upon the present

student body is the fact that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse
went down in the Second World War, went down to Davy Jones'
locker.

That is why students do not take the standard figures

any more.

Before the Prince of Wales and the Repulse Britannia

ruled the waves, and she certified that minor figures of the
seventeenth century were excellent and should be studied--put
their stamp on it, you know.

But art follows the flag, and when

England went down, then so did English departments as we used to
know them.

Now, they might say "A modern novel is as good as

Jane Austen," or something like that--"We need diversity"--but

Edwards 8
you didn't need diversity when Britannia ruled the waves.

You

So I'm rather

tried to follow what you thought was the lead.

glad that I got out of the profession when I did because it would
be awfully hard for me to adjust myself to the present study of
English.
Q.

Have you seen these columns I've written for the

Journal-World lately about that very subject?

I know it's an

old-fashioned attitude, but I find a lot of people I've been
talking with think what I say is right.
A.

You and I know that there's been a decline, but the

young don't know that there's been a decline; the young always
assume that their age is the greatest of ages.

They don't worry

about it the way you and I would worry about it.

We know that

Shakespeare is greater than any other living English literature
figure; we just know it.

But they don't know it.

something to do with authority, in a way.

It has

The young don't want

any kind of authority, whether it's Shakespeare or whether it's
the state, or whatever it is.
There's not much we can do.

They simply do not want authority.
We can get some comfort in the

knowledge of the fact that no declining nation ever realized it
was declining.

Corinth, which was one of the most decadent

cities that ever existed back in Paul's time, didn't know it was
corrupt.

It didn't know it was declining.

It just assumed that

everything was as it should be, and I think that's the way with
our own time.

Most of the evidence that I can see shows evidence

Edwards 9
But those who are younger than I, who are immersed

of a decline.

in it, they don't see any decline at all.
Q.

Did you ever mix this kind of stuff up at an English

faculty meeting when course requirements were being dealt with
and new courses proposed and so on?
A.

Yes.

3, and 4.

When I first came here, I supervised English 1, 2,

You had to have 12 hours of English then.

In those

four semesters, I put in the established reading list for those
courses, and that included the Bible, Plato, the Greek plays,
Shakespeare, and Milton.

We even thought that the novel was too

trivial to be put into a University course, so we didn't include
the novel in any of the reading lists.

But that didn't last.

It

didn't last because they said the students didn't like it as much
as they should.

They thought it might be easier if we had more

popular works, so we began to teach what we called genre
literature.

One semester they have poetry, and the next semester

they have the novel, and the next semester plays, and so on, but
the caliber of the reading list declined drastically from then.
There isn't much you can do about an old system when it's in a
decline.

There really isn't very much you can do about it.

Q.

How many years did you spend at Oklahoma State?

A.

Three years, I guess.

One year before the war and two

years after the war.
Q.

I saw here that you went into the Air Corps in 1942?

You were in for three years?

Edwards 10
A.

Virgie and I had gone to a movie.

When we got out of

the movie we heard that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and we
both knew that life as we knew it was gone.
it instinctively.

We both recognized

Maybe a few months later the Air Corps was

looking for instructors who would teach bombing and ground
school, and they wanted experienced teachers.

They commissioned

us directly from civilian life as second lieutenants, and we had
to go down to Miami Beach and spend six weeks, actually most of
the time doing close-order drill.

For a person who's in the Air

Corps, close-order drill is one of the strangest things that
possibly could exist, I suppose.

Anyway, we had close-order

drill under a boiling sun at Miami where we worked about eight
hours a day.

There was no air conditioning then, and we would go

back to our hotel, and the German subs off the East Coast had
been active, so there was a blackout, so you couldn't even open
your window (it was blacked out with a curtain over it).

You'd

go down there and no air conditioning in those hotels--it's a
wonder we didn't die.

After six weeks, then we were sent to

mostly various places in Texas where most of the Air Corps camps
I was sent to San Angelo, and Virgie joined me there, and

were.

for three years I taught bombing and navigation at San Angelo on
the Air Force base there.

Army.

d3:3�

Q.

What background did you have for teaching that?

A.

I didn't have any.

It didn't make any difference to the

That isn't the way the Army runs things.

One of my

colleagues in this thing was a guy from Peoria who was a

Edwards 11
professional photographer, and so the Air Corps approached him
and said, "We need professional photographers," so they
commissioned him too.

He was down there with us, and he was

doing the same thing we were doing.

Graduate student in 'English

and this professional photographer--both of us were teaching
bombing.
Q.

That's interesting.

Did you spend the war years here in

this country?
A.

Yes.

It sounds real comfy, to say that we spent three

and a half years in San Angelo, Texas, in the Army, but it wasn't
quite that pleasant because we never knew from one week to the
next whether we'd be sent over to bomb Berlin, so you could never
rest easy, wondering if you would be sent out next.

Yes, we

stayed in San Angelo for three and a half years.
Q.

I'm going to have to backtrack here briefly, because

there's something I want to ask you about.

It goes back before

You were engaged in social work?

that.
A.

That was during the Depression in the middle '30s.

was engaged in social work.

I

I had no training as a social

worker, but it was in charge of the state at that time, and it
included to some extent the WPA--you know, the Works Progress
Administration--and also it was the people with whom you dealt-­
all kinds of people.

Some were down on their luck; some were

invalids; and some would be on welfare no matter how prosperous
the country was.

Yes, I was in that for three years.

did like it very much, but it was experience.

I never

I had some rough

Edwards 12
and tough experience.

Actually, to face the problem squarely,

capitalism had really hired me to see that we didn't put out too
much money to these people on welfare.
really was.
the time.

This is what the job

I suspected that; it was in the back of my mind all
As for professional social work, only the supervisor

was trained in that.

You know, adjusting families, family

problems, and this sort of thing.

We were concerned with

employment, with grocery orders, with money for the people and so
on.
Q.

What city were you in?

A.

Both in Winfield and Arkansas City.

Q.

Small towns.

A.

They were governmental jobs.

These were governmental jobs?
Really state; the

government put it in the hands of the state, so it was really
Kansas.

I've forgotten--KERC, I think.

-this is what it was called.
find anything else.

Kansas Emergency Relief­

I took the job because I couldn't

It was after I spent three years in social

work that I determined that I would go on and take some more work
in English, and that's why I went to the University of Iowa.
Q.

The background of that--working in the cities, getting

out in the slums and so on--this was the kind of background that
Theodore Dreiser had for the books that he wrote.

I'm not sure

he was ever a great writer, but he was a powerful one.
A.

Yes.

They're more or less out of favor now because we

don't like to think or consider the Depression; it's just

Edwards 13
something that is not done.

There's a whole school, you see; the

novels of Steinbeck, those are concerned with the Depression.
Q.

Who's the Missouri man--Jack Conroy, who just came back

into fashion in a way.

I hadn't even heard of him until I read

that book The Disinherited about twenty years ago.

When the war

was over, you went to Illinois for a year?
A.

Yes.

I went to Illinois.

I met this Henig Larson, who

taught Old English, and he went as Chair to the Department of
English at Illinois.

I [was] then discharged from the Army in

the middle of the year, so Larson said they needed some
instructors in English and asked if I'd like to do it.

I said,

well, I got the job at Oklahoma State, but I won't be going there
till next fall, so I taught a semester at the University of
Illinois.

So I taught at Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma state,

and the Air Corps.
Q.

Then you came here in 1948.

A.

'47, I think.

Q.

How did you happen to come here?

A.

The reason I had to come here is, the head of the

I think I came here in '47.

department at Oklahoma state was invited to become chairman at
Kansas.

So after I had stayed another year there at Oklahoma

State, he invited me to come up and supervise the 1, 2, 3, 4
English, so that's the reason I came to Kansas.
Q.

Who was the head of the department?

A.

Clubb, Merrel Clubb.

Q.

Oh yeah.

You remember him.

How long was he head of the department?

Edwards 14
A.

I imagine maybe seven or eight years.

Q.

And who was it following him?

Q.

I'm trying to keep track of all the people.

A.' Let's see--Jim Wortham.
You came

here three or four years before I did, but I suppose I knew most
of the people who would have been teaching here then.

Who were

some of the other people on the faculty at that time?
A.

Well, some have gone now.

Merrel, Bill Paden, John

Hankins.
Q.

People like Hal Orel and George Worth didn't come

until-A.

They're newcomers as far as I'm concerned.

Q.

Yeah, they came after I did.

a time.
A.

That must have been quite

Did you and Virgie get stuck in Sunnyside?
Yes.

That was funny.

What the university had done was

to buy up some of these barracks and move them down to what is
now called Sunnyside Parking or something--they moved all those
barracks down there.

Each barrack consisted of four apartments,

two downstairs and two upstairs, and they gave us one of these
upstairs apartments.
those days.

As I say, there was no air conditioning in

No insulation.

That used to be almost the sole

topic of conversation when you met somebody in the morning:
you'd talk about what a horrible night you'd had.
Q.

No cabinets.

A.

No.

Edwards 15
Q.

That was a very good social atmosphere, though, because

we were all the same.

I remember one summer I was working on the

Topeka Daily Capital and I would take off and they would be out
there under the tree by the sandpile with all of the other wives
and all the little kids playing there in the sand, and that's how
we got to know the Meserves, and a good many other people that
were there at that time.
A.

These were our friends.

I remember I was working just part time in an

abstractor's office, and the lady in charge of the office came
laughing to work one morning and said that what they all did, was
you had to sleep out on the back lawn or you couldn't sleep at
all.

So here were all these people sleeping next to each other

all down the block in their back yards.

She said that shortly

after they had gotten into bed, this lady's voice just came out
loud and clear, "Oh, not tonight.
Q.

It's too hot."

It would have been too hot for anybody out there.

You

know what I remember from down there was the cockroaches.
A.

Oh, really?

Q.

When we moved to Tennessee Street, we took cockroaches

with us, and we had to spray.

We finally got rid of them.

I

also remember the family who had lived in the same building--now
this may have been a myth--but they were from the Orient and rice
had dropped down in the cracks, and they had been so unclean that
roaches were actually coming up.
but that's what we were told.
Sunnyside!

I'm not sure I believe that,

What life was like there in

When did you folks move out to the country?

Edwards 16
A.

I think in '48.

Q.

Well, you moved out there not long after you'd been in

Sunnyside.
A.

Yeah, we went from Sunnyside.

Q.

How'd you happen to go out there?

A.

We didn't have a car to keep up, and we saved enough

money during the war, and we didn't like Sunnyside, so we thought
we'd buy a house.
house now.

Buying a house then was simpler than buying a

An agent took us out to see this big old two-story

stone house, at that time two miles from town,; now the town's
right across the road from us.

He took us out to see this house,

and he supposed naturally that I had a family, and he says, "We
wouldn't try to sell this house to just a couple.
it's for a family."
like peas in a pod."

He says, "A couple would rattle around here
He didn't know we were just a couple.

we liked the place, so we bought it for $10,000.
it ever since.

It's so big,
But

We've enjoyed

Right across the road from us was the country,

and we used to watch the coyotes running after the deer at a 160
south of us.

We saw the wild turkeys out there.

We have a pond;

we built a pond, so we have geese and ducks on the pond.
the illusion that we were living in the country.

We had

We couldn't

sustain that illusion now, because the town's everywhere.
Q.

I understand your place was kind of a refuge for dogs

and cats?
A.

Oh, yes.

We lived just far enough out of town so it's

convenient for people to take their animals or pets out and drop

Edwards 17
them off in front of our house, so we never bought a pet, and
we've had pets all our lives.

We've had as many as twelve cats,

and I guess three dogs at a time is the most we've had of dogs.
Yes, we've had pets all the time.
Q.

Did you have some kind of outbuilding or shed or barn or

something?
A.
house.

No, they were all house animals.

They all came into the

We had some steps that lead inside into the kitchen.

It's a flight of steps, and we had this one dog that dropped off,
a great big long-haired white dog, and it was apparent that he
had never experienced steps in his life because he could hardly
get up them.

He'd take one step at a time and take the next one;

he had never been into a house before, and he had never been
This big white dog had never experienced the inside of

trained.

a house and didn't know how to behave.

At a meal one time,

Virgie had cut off a piece of her steak and took the fork in her
hand and started it toward her mouth, and this white dog leaped
through the air and grabbed the steak off her fork.
right to him; he hadn't been taught any manners.
had a pet.

Seemed all

We've always

We had a horse for years--20 years we had a horse out

there.
Q.

Did you like to ride?

A.

Yes, I liked to ride.

We didn't give him enough

exercise really, but girls at K.U. were glad we had the horse and
so would come out and ride him, give him exercise.

Edwards 18
Q.

I'm interested in some of the courses that you taught.
Did

You got your own list here that you made yourself years ago.
you teach Chaucer in most of the years?
A.

Not most of the years, but maybe a third of the years.

Q.

What kind of enrollment did you have in that, Carroll?

A.

Usually about twelve students.

Q.

Was it required?

A.

I don't think it was required.

They were small classes.
I don't think so.

It

could be that in your requirement you would have something like
"three major literary figures," and you could take Chaucer as one
of your three major literary figures.

Some requirement like

that--I don't think ever a direct requirement, that you had to
take Chaucer.
Q.

Shakespeare must have been required, though.

A.

Shakespeare was required by the School of Education;

they required it, but if you're an English major, I think you
just naturally take Shakespeare.

I'm not sure it was required.

If you had that one of three required, most of them would take
Shakespeare.
Q.

And then you taught the Modern Drama.

always interested me.

The word "modern"

I remember I took Recent American History

when I was in college, and it began after the Civil War and
"Recent American History" a number of years ago would have been
after World War II.

Of modern--modern begins--

Edwards 19
A.

Modern begins wherever whoever says where it begins, so

we said Modern Drama begins with Ibsen, and in some ways it's
justified, because Ibsen was the originator of the problem play.
Q.

As I remember, Ibsen would have been the first also in a

class that I took.

I guess a great part because of the

adventurous subject matter that he attempted, the kind of thing
that hadn't been tried before.
things--A Doll's House.

People writing about such daring

What's the one about--Ghosts.

That was

a shocker when that one came around.
A.

They were supposed to present problems, you see.

Ghosts

you would say, "Should you honor your father and your mother?"
Should you honor Captain [Elvin], who gave Oscar syphilis, so
Oscar was born with syphilis?

So those were all social problems,

and caused a good deal of controversy.
Q.

A little heavier in mood--I've often wondered if that

happens to you when you live in Scandinavia.
A.

They usually make this division between what they call

the well-made play and Ibsen's social problem plays.

Well-made

plays were popular in France, where you just had a formula which
you followed.

You just had a formula and you just followed this

formula at the end.

You aren't really concerned about social

problems, or for that matter about anything important.

You just

had a formula like the surprise figure from the past--see, he's
supposed to enter into it--and all these others.

They thought

they were theatrical things, so you just put them all in your
play.

It came out as the well-made play.

Edwards 20
Q.

Which of the playwrights did you like?

A.

I like Shaw best of the bunch; I like Ibsen very much,

but I like Shaw the best.
know.

Shaw is a real startling figure, you

He refused to be down.

He was maybe romantic in his

notion that the world and man are perfectible.

I don't think

anybody believes that any more, but Shaw did, and the reason Shaw
wrote his plays is because he wanted to help perfect mankind.

He

wasn't interested in the dough and he wasn't interested in the
He was a teacher and he wanted to do his bit to see that

fame.

people became better.

He thought they became better as they

listened to his plays, so that's the way he wrote his plays.
Q.

He also entertained us in the process, which doesn't

apply to all of them.
A.

No, that's true.

You know there's that ancient--well,

Horace says profit and pleasure, and that's been true of all the
great artists in the past.

They just took this for granted, that

a work of art should be profit and pleasure.
Q.

Were there any of those people of the great modern

playwrights that you didn't really care for much?
A.

Yes, but none that I've absolutely disliked because they

probably wouldn't have been accepted as great modern dramatists
in that case, but some of them you just don't care very much
about, but chiefly the obscure ones.

The modern notion is that

if you're obscure it must mean that you're real intelligent.
Instead of striving for lucidity like the Greeks did, the modern
poet or the modern dramatist thinks that he has the right to be

Edwards 21
obscure, and I didn't like those.

There are certainly modern

dramatists that I don't have any regard for, but you don't find
those in anthologies ordinarily.
Q.

Did you include any American other than O'Neill or did

you include O'Neill?
A.

It included O'Neill.

Now this was just after World War

II and the reason you include O'Neill is because we developed the
atomic bomb.

Art follows the flag, and when we developed the

atomic bomb, then that meant that other nations would listen to
what our artists had to say, and O'Neill was one of those
figures.

His earlier plays hadn't been very successful, but then

with the coming of the atom bomb, O'Neill became an important
playwright.

I think we have others--certainly Williams and

Miller are important American playwrights--but that's just about
all that we've had.
Auden was talking about something else, but that can be
applied to this.

He was saying that the late nineteenth century

and the early twentieth century was a period in grand opera which
was probably as great as fifth century Greece was in its drama.
One could almost say this about modern drama.

For this brief

period, you get all these important playwrights and no one can
account for it.

How can you account for Shakespeare?

Someone

thinks the only way you can account for Shakespeare is if a layer
of ozone settled near the earth, people were invigorated, and
suddenly outdid themselves, and it's impossible to explain those
great modern dramatists.

Edwards 22
Carroll, did people like Elmer Rice and Robert Sherwood

Q.

and Philip Barry have any real importance, or was that mainly
popular drama?
A.

You'd probably have to say that [there was] no real and

lasting importance.

They certainly grabbed your attention and

they tried to talk about serious things, but for some reason or
other they just didn't attain first rank in those.
that's in the eyes of the beholder.

Of course,

Thornton Wilder is an

important figure in Germany; they think he's pretty good.

We no

longer think he's pretty good, but they think he's pretty good.
Of course, a play like Our Town is so much a part of the

Q.

whole American culture in a way; I guess that's why he would be
there.

When did you become associated with the Modern Drama

magazine?
A.

It must have been in the late '50s.

Q.

Was it started here?

A.

Yes, it started here.

I had been teaching modern drama,

and suddenly became aware that there was just no journal on
modern drama, and so I went to the College.

You had to be sure

when you started something like that or you would lose everything
you had.

I went to the library and got out all the catalogs, and

found that next to Shakespeare, modern drama was the course that
English departments most frequently offered, which was a
surprise.

This meant that you would likely get some library

subscriptions, which you have to have.

We then put an ad in the

Tulane Drama Review that we intended to bring out a scholarly

Edwards 23
journal on modern drama and we would welcome contributions.

So I

waited until I had a year and a half's supply of those
contributions before we decided to publish--that's the way you
started it.

Oddly enough, that was another problem.

Are there

enough scholars writing on modern drama so that you can sustain a
journal?

I still didn't know, you just had to wait, so I waited

a year and a half and got a very good supply of pretty good
articles, and then we started publishing the journal.

I

published it the first 16 years of its existence.
Q.

Was it quarterly?

A.

Quarterly.

We got an old hard-bitten Confederate over

in Columbia, Missouri, a printer.
already talked to him about it.
we economize.

And we got Walt.

I had

So we were thinking, how could

We thought, how about the proofreading?

Do we pay

He [the printer] said yes, you have to pay for the

for that?

proofreading, for the time spent on it.

We said, how about it if

we pay you for the errors that we make and not pay you for the
errors that you make?

Well, [he said] okay, okay, okay.

Meriweather was his name.
Q.

What was the year--you told me before we actually

started taping--your time with Modern Drama came to an end--when
was it?
A.

Let me see here just a minute.

Q.

About 1973.

A.

It was an awful amount of work, because we did

everything.

Tell me, how much work was it?

You just don't realize.

No one really starts up a

Edwards 24
magazine the way we did, just Virgie and I, and we had to do all
the mailing, all the addressing.

You were supposed to keep 250

back copies of each issue.

You'd be surprised later at the

libraries who wanted them.

We used to lug those 40-pound cartons

of books up to the attic above the garage, up some rickety steps,
and Virgie just wore herself out making those address lists.
There are a lot of things with the computer now and so on that it
wouldn't be the worry now it was then, but it was an awful lot of
work.
out.

I didn't get any time off for several years for putting it
At the last, I was relieved of one teaching course a year.
Q.

Tell me something.

Was that something that was credited

in your record in terms of research, or was it service?

How did

the university regard the publication?
A.

The administration, the promotions committee and that,

they probably regarded it as publication.

You see, now, what I

was doing was editing, and they regard (as] publication anyone
that puts out an edited book or an edited collection of poems or
something like that.
Q.

Did you write much for it yourself?

A.

No, I wrote some reviews and a little piece or two for

it, but I didn't write much for it myself.

In fact, we didn't

accept local contributions.
Q.

Walt was working with you on that.

lot of research at that time on Howells.

I remember he did a

Howells was not really

what I would call a major figure as a playwright.

Edwards 25
A.

No, he wasn't, he wasn't, but yes, Walt brought out the

standard edition; New York University published it, the standard
edition of Howell's plays.
magazine.

He was good help to have on the

One thing about Walt was that he could see through

pretention like nobody else I ever knew.

He knew whether it was

pretention or not, and so we'd get contributions, and sometimes
from real well-known people, but that didn't matter to Walt.
was whether the article was good or not.

It

One thing I always

admired him for, which I didn't think I'd have courage enough to
do, he accepted an article from a black teacher at a junior
college in Oklahoma, and ordinarily you'd think that a black
teacher at a junior college in Oklahoma couldn't write for Modern
Drama, but it was a good article and Walt accepted it.

It didn't

matter who you were; it's whether your article was good or not.
Q.

Carroll, who were some of your colleagues that you have

special memories of or special affection for?

People who you

worked with in your years in the English department?
A.

Well, I remember all the girls and some of the young men

we hired to work for Modern Drama.

I probably remember those

because I was sitting out here, isolated in an office putting out
Modern Drama, and I really didn't have very much to do with my
colleagues at that time, and it was mostly these young people
that I was with.
John Hankins.

John Hankins I remember--we still hear from

He lives on a farm in Maine.

He must be 90 now.

He sent us a photograph of himself shoveling snow so they could
get out to the garage, so he's pretty active.

Then Merrel Clubb,

Edwards 26
who was an old standby, with me at Oklahoma state and with me
here, and I have fond memories of him.

Then there's the young

people in the department, a lot of them.

Gerhard zuther came

here while I was at K.U., a good deal younger than I, and I
remember him well.

In Germany he belonged to the Nazi youth

party, and he came over here when he was 19.
language.

He was a genius at

He spoke English with not a trace of a German accent

to it, and not only that, he knew words which most Americans
wouldn't recognize, English words.

I used to try to catch him,

and I remember one time, I said, "Can you tell me what a
cowcatcher is?"

And he says, "That's that grid that they put on

the front of an engine."
Q.

He knew that.

Lots of Americans wouldn't know that.

There's something

I wanted to ask you about, and maybe you don't want to talk about
it.

I was always very fond of Frank Nelick, and I remember years

ago that Frank and Dennis Quinn and also John Senior became
involved in a whole lot of controversy because of the Pearson
program.

In fact, Frank has been interviewed in this same thing,

but he can't release the transcript yet because these fellows
have run a lawsuit against someone because of what was written
about the Pearson program.
A.

Yes, I know it.

Q.

Is it over?

A.

Yes, it's over.

Q.

Well, then I'm going to call Frank, because he told me

he'd let me know.

They won it.
They won it.

They gave my name to their lawyer because I

Edwards 27
wrote a few articles kind of in defense of their program.

I

could see why it was controversial; I can see why it angered a
lot of people, but our daughter Kathy was in it, and found it a
quite positive experience.

I always got along very well with

Frank.
A.

You know that Pearson--that was George Waggoner's idea.

Waggoner was the dean of the College, and he was going to set up
what he thought would be an improvement in the university
structure, especially in the College of Liberal Arts, so you'd
have various colleges in the College of Liberal Arts.

I don't

think he thought it through, and immediately he ran into
opposition from the chairmen.

They didn't want to lose power,

you see; the chairmen didn't want to lose power, and so they
opposed it.

Well, anyway, Pearson College was one of those

colleges which was set up--there were four or five of them--and
Pearson College was one of them, and Dennis Quinn was the
director of Pearson College, and I agree with you; I think it had
a lot more virtue to it than some thought.

I used to have some

of their students in classes; they'd recommend my Shakespeare
class or Chaucer class or something like that to those Pearson
students, and by golly, they were ideal students.
ideal students.

They were just

I think it was a great loss when they defeated

that college plan; I think it should have been a step in the
right direction.
Q.

Well, Dennis has a personality that angers people.

can be a hard guy to get along with.

He

I never knew John Senior.

Edwards 28
Frank, I always thought, was one of the most amiable guys I ever
knew, but Dennis and I bumped heads a good many times.
A.

Yes, he's pretty set in his ways.

Q.

I haven't talked to him in a long time, of course; I've

talked with other people in your faculty.

I'm very close to Hal

Orel, and I know George Worth quite well, and Joel Gold.

I think

these are some solid, solid people.
A.

I think most of those people you mentioned were good

teachers, and Frank was an excellent teacher.
teacher.
teachers.

Joel Gold is a real good teacher.

Dennis was a good
They were good

I'll tell you what about Frank, I don't know if you'll

include it in this interview, but I'll tell you about Frank and
his teaching.

You never knew what was going to come up.

was teaching his poetry class.

Frank

He was teaching "With rue my

heart laden"--it's a poem, and it just goes,
With rue, my heart is laden
For many a friend I had
For many a rose-lipped maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot lads are laid
The rose-lipped girls lie sleeping
In fields where lilies fade.
Well, Frank was taking up this poem in his class, and he thought
he'd find out whether or not they knew what was going on in the
poem, and so he says, "What do you think is going on here anyway

Edwards 29
in this poem?"

And some boy stands up, and he says, "Well, I

think it's a poem about a guy who is sorry about laying the
girls."

"By brooks too broad for leaping/ The lightfoot lads

are laid."

That "laid" gets stuck in the student's mind, and he

says, "It's by a guy who's sorry about laying the girls."

And

Frank, with not a change in his features at all, said, "No, no,
it's about a bunch of queers," he says.

"See?

'By brooks too

broad for leaping/ The lightfoot lads are laid.'"
back on it during the day.

He never went

He just let his whole class walk out

into the world assuming that Houseman's poem was about a bunch of
queers.
Q.

That was something.
Who are some of the students you had that stand out in

your memory?
A.
[them].

You mentioned the ones that worked on Modern Drama.

There were a lot of them.

Eleanor Hadley was one of

She was a real good student.

She went from here and

went to Yale.
Q.

She took Western Civ from me.

from the Kansas City paper.

Her dad was Hugh Hadley,

Didn't she marry Barbara Waggoner's

son?
A.

No, she didn't.

was from New York.

She married a guy she met at Yale.

His father was superintendent of the schools

there.

her.

He

Q.

I remember Eleanor.

A.

Yes, I remember Eleanor.

I still keep in touch with

Her family lives in Kansas City, and when they come

through, she comes back to visit her family and then usually

Edwards 30
comes over and visits us too.

And there was Barbara Avery, who

was the daughter of the former governor.
student.

She was a very bright

I think you usually remember those that were bright.

It's too bad you don't remember the others.

They aren't

necessarily the best people at all, but I think you remember
those who were bright.

There was Gretchen Engler, who married

and went over to Europe; her husband was an Episcopalian priest.
She went over to Europe and stayed there.
there.
Q.

She's still over

And some of the young fellows, I remember those.
Something I was wondering about, I wanted to ask you.

Here under "Scholarship" and so on, is that an article that you
wrote?
A.

Yes, that's an article I sent to TLS.

the war had started.

That's just after

"Knaresborough Castle and the King's[?],"

that's a Chaucer article.

Knaresborough Castle is a castle in

England, and when Thomas a Beckett was murdered, the knights who
murdered him fled to Knaresborough Castle, and the place took on
a real bad name.

So one day I was reading and I noticed

parallels to Chaucer's "Lawyer's Tale."
stepmother theme.

It deals with the wicked

In the "Lawyer's Tale," it said that the

knights stopped at what he calls "the king's mother's court."
And then I happened to read one just after Chaucer, one which was
written before, a Dominican monk had written, the same tale.
Both of these guys, on each side of Chaucer, says "We stopped at
Knaresborough."

Well, the king's mother was the wicked

stepmother, and she owned Knaresborough in Chaucer's tale, when

Edwards 31
in actually John of Gaunt owned it.

John of Gaunt was Chaucer's

patron, so Chaucer couldn't afford to have his patron's property
identified as Knaresborough; it would have been quite a slam to
John of Gaunt.

But some of those things, the detective stuff,

you know, they're fun to run down, that's all.
Q.

What about committees?

Did you get stuck on a lot of

them in your university days?
A.

No.

Q.

Promotions Committee?

A.

I can't remember.

Q.

You didn't ever do that?

A.

No, I don't think so, no.

I was on the College Administrative Committee one

time.

Is there still a College

Administrative Committee?
Q.

I think so.

A.

It probably doesn't do anything.

Q.

I don't know.

any more.

I don't know.
A lot of that stuff, I'm not sure they do

The Promotions Committee does all that, because I was

on the University Promotions Committee twice.
butts off in a few weeks.
A.

We worked our

It was really a job.

I avoided the public eye because I was putting out this

magazine, and I was stuck way over here in Sudlow.

Is it Sudlow?

Yes, Sudlow.
Q.

That's where you worked.

A.

No, Virgie worked at home.

home and she worked at home.

Did Virgie work there too?
We set her up an office at

I worked over there, with a student

Edwards 32
helper or two and Walt.

You see, Walt was with me.

So I was out

of the public eye and they didn't think of me when they were
setting up these committees, which was all to my good.

I didn't

do very much committee work at all.
Q.

Do you feel that your university progress or whatever

was ever held back because you weren't on a lot of committees?
A.

No, because, we didn't put much emphasis on that when I

first came here.

That was only later when they started this

importance of committees.
anyway.

They may say that teaching matters, or that committees

matter, but they don't.
Q.

All that matters is publication
It's publication.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

stress teaching.

No matter how hard they try to

What year did you retire?

A.

Eleven years--it must have been 1980.

Q.

You retired when you were 70?

A.

Actually I was 71.

I got to teach an additional year

because of this rule that school had started before you're 70,
you see, and my birthday's in August, and school had really
started just before my birthday, so I taught that year.
Q.

Did you and Virgie ever get much traveling done?

A.

Yes, we did in a way.

We've been going back and forth

to Illinois for years now, and we go maybe five or six times a
year back and forth to Illinois.

Virgie inherited two old houses

back there and we've been going back and forth fixing them up and
so on, and just to get away.

We went to Europe and for four

months we just bummed around in a Volkswagen, over in Europe.

We

Edwards 33
didn't have any reservations at all in those days.

We would just

go as far as we wanted to go, and stop and find a room in France
or Italy or Spain, and we had a good time.

Four and a half

months we were on the road over there.
Q.

How about in England, in the land of your--

A.

Yes, that was part of it too.

up, was in London.

That's where we last put

We [wandered] up through Ireland and over

through Scotland, and we didn't travel around England as much as
we should have done.
Q.

Did you visit the homes of the literary people?

A.

Yes.

Q.

Chaucer--where was Chaucer from?

A.

We were over there in England and I said, "I'd like to

meet Sean O'Casey."

So we went down to Torquay--that's where he

lives--and he was almost 80.
Q.

He lived in England?

A.

He lived in England.

down south in England.

He lived in Torquay, which is way

So I went up to the door and I had a

magazine, and I told the maid, "Would you show this to Sean
O'Casey and ask him if it would be all right if we saw him for a
few minutes."
there."

And she comes back and she says, "Yes, he's

So I go in and Sean was alone.

talk, and I saw him once more after that.
more after that.
Q.

What was he like?

So we had a real good
I visited him once

Edwards 34
A.

Well, he's Irish.

was Irish.

That's probably the first thing, he

He was thin, real thin, and kind of bony, and wears

real heavy glasses because of his sight.

Smoked a pipe.

He had

on this placard up above his fireplace, he had this placard up
here that said "Get the hell on with the play."

I think O'Casey

liked to talk, and he liked to visit, he liked to write letters.
I got several letters from Sean O'Casey.

He's a very

compassionate guy, no streak of cruelty in him in at all.
Q.

Who's the Irishman who wrote The Playboy of the Western

World?
A.

Synge.

I put out a special issue of the journal, and it

was devoted to Synge and O'Casey, and I don't think O'Casey was
too pleased at being coupled with Synge, because he never thought
Synge was very important.

O'Casey's a communist and a social

writer, and all his plays deal with social subjects in one way or
another, and he thought that Synge dodged the issue; his plays
aren't socially important.
Q.
Players?

What's the Dublin Theater [group called]--the Abbey
He was part of that?

A.

Yes.

Q.

The Plough and the stars?

A.

The Plough and the stars is O'Casey.

Synge was part of

it and writing plays for them, and also in simply managing the
theater, he and Lady Gregory and Yeats.
Q.
thought?

Synge was good, wasn't he?

In spite of what O'Casey

Edwards 35
A.

Oh, yes.

theater.

Synge is still put on the stage, he's still

He has the dramatic instinct.

He had the Irish in him.

Someone asked Shaw one time, years after Shaw became world
famous, they said, "Do you ever think about yourself?

What was

it that you had, anyway, that you should become a world-famous
figure?"

Shaw said, "I don't know.

Maybe I have the Irish gift of gab."
of gab, and so did Synge.

I don't know what it is.
O'Casey had the Irish gift

The playboy, you know, has the gift of

gab.

He seduces that barmaid just because of his language, his

talk.

"Boy," she says, "you got a fine bit o' talk, stranger."

They love that gab, the Irish do.
Q.

I don't remember the name of the author, but he wrote a

book about the Irish-Americans in which he suggested that so many
Irish become prominent in politics because of their feeling for
language, their love for oratory and sounding off.
A.

Probably true.

Q.

What have you been doing in your retirement years?

A.

It's safe to say I've done almost nothing.

I have a

hobby of grinding stones and polishing them and making jewelry
out of them, and so I spend some time on that.

Of course, we

have those ten acres to keep you busy that we have out next to
the house.

Taking care of the overgrowths, you know--

Q.

Do you grow any crops?

Vegetables?

A.

Yes, we always had a big garden, until this year.

Got a

garden, but it isn't big like we usually have.
Q.

Probably getting a little tired of that.

I know I am.

Edwards 36
A.

You can't justify it any more.

Did you ever go down to

the Farmer's Market?
Q.

Always.

A.

There you are.

Why should you have a garden when you

have the farmer's market?
Q.

We always try to have tomatoes and peppers.

about all.

That's

Years ago I even had a little bit of corn.

are worth some work.

It's really fun to do that stuff.

Onions
Do you

still read a lot?
A.

Yes, I read a lot.

That's what I do mostly if I'm not

working around the house or the yard.
Q.

[Do you watch any] movies?

A.

We don't watch much T.V., but we watch the mysteries

when they come on in the evenings, almost every day of the week
there's a detective [show].
Q.

That's the kind of stuff I like too.

I'm kind of

interested in what they're going to do with Willa Cather's

Q

Pioneers! this week.
A.

Is that coming out?

Q.

It's on Friday night on public television, and I believe

it's a type of musical.

Nola said you and Virgie rather liked

Franco Zeffirelli's version of Hamlet.
A.

Yes, I thought it was quite satisfactory.

Q.

No, I haven't.

it?

Did you see

Edwards 37
A.

This is a long tradition of Hamlet.

They make Hamlet a

moody, melancholy Dane who can't act and he didn't play that way,
and I think there's justification for not playing him that way.
They've over-emphasized the melancholy of Hamlet and the fact
that he's poetic instead of active, but this is a more active
Hamlet, this last one.

Pretty good.

Q.

In fact, they always say, "The melancholy Dane."

A.

That's the way they've regarded it.

Q.

Carroll, do you have any observations to make about your

University of Kansas experience?

There's something I've always

wondered about, and that was that period in the late '60s and the
counterculture, that kind of thing.

Did that have any effect on

you?
It's strange--it didn't.

A.

I never had any trouble in my

classes with those students, so in a way it passed me over.
Well, in fact, I think probably I joined in with the students a
I remember they were all going over on Malott lawn and

little.

standing in protest of something or other--I've forgotten what-­
so I went over and stood with them, with a placard.

I'm sure I

was put on the FBI list, but I didn't have any trouble with the
students.

There was a great deal of pressure then to modernize

things, bringing literature up to date.

It didn't faze me, I

didn't pay any attention to that.
Q.

Make things relevant.

A.

Make things relevant--that was the word.

Relevant.

I

didn't pay any attention to it and I never had any trouble with

Edwards 38
the students.
sorehead.

They knew I meant business, and I wasn't a

I didn't think of myself as different from the

students, so I didn't have any trouble with the students in that
period.
Q.

In general I was in sympathy with the students.
This is a leading question.

Maybe I hadn't better

phrase it that way, but what's your overall feeling about your
university experience here, and your days in Lawrence?
A.

Well, I say essentially that I regretted that--I don't

know how many years ago it is, a good many years ago now, maybe,
twenty years ago--the University decided to emphasize graduate
work instead of undergraduate, and I've regretted that because
Kansas was beginning to get a real fine reputation as an
undergraduate school, and you can sustain an excellence in
undergraduate work cheaply when compared with what it takes to
maintain excellency in the graduate work.

We cannot compete at

graduate work, and we cannot and never will compete with Cal Tech
and MIT and Harvard and the University of Chicago, and we will
always be a second-rate graduate school when we could have been a
first-rate undergraduate school.

The emphasis now is on the

graduate work, rather than on the undergraduate, and I've
regretted that.

I think everybody would probably have led a

little bit happier lives if they had continued the emphasis on
the undergraduate work, just tried to become first-rate (which
they were) undergraduate school.
regretted.

So that's one thing I've

On the whole, I don't have complaints about K.U.; I'm

Edwards 39
not nuts about the place, but I don't have any real complaints
about it.
Q.

You were here a long time, so you must have liked it

well enough.

I know in my case there was a time when I

definitely wanted to get away but after a few more years went by
I came to like it more and more, and I guess now I think this was
a pretty good place to have lived.
A.
of.

I think so, and that's what I've come to the conclusion

We had many advantages; we're just an hour from Kansas City

and the climate may be abominable, but we do have long nice
falls.
Q.

Fairly nice springs; summers are miserable.

A.

I think the faculty relations in general have improved

since I came here.
an iron hand.
to.

When I came here, the Chancellor ruled with

You could hire and fire a teacher if you wanted

No one else had to agree with him.

But that's gone, and I

think the administration at K.U. has improved as far as the
relationship of the faculty is concerned.
Q.

Carroll, are there any other things you'd like to add?

We both have touched on a good many things in our conversation.
A.

No, I don't have any now.

I don't have anything I think

is important enough to bring up.
Q.

What I'll do is, as soon as I can have it transcribed

. I'm going to see if I can get the English Department to do
it.

I've been asked by several departments, because we have a

terrible time getting these things transcribed--finding

Edwards 40
Of course, we also have a terrible time finding

secretaries.
enough money.
departments.

That's one reason we're calling on so many
I thought I would ask.

After I get it transcribed,

I'll get it back to you and you can look it over and see whether
it's okay.
A.
:kh

I thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you, Calder.

CERTIFICAlE CF GIFT

Fm� HISTCRY J.XKR3
For ttE p..irpose of furttering sch:llarly resean::::h and teaching at the
l..hiversi ty of Kansas, I hereby give to the l.hiversi ty the tape recorcb.ng and
transcript of the .interview cmducted .in �±,0... 9
'))C er If;...
tor the Uu.versity of
.., /t}r,9/
____________, m
Kansas Libraries. It is my .i.nta,tim, by this gift, to cmvey to the
l..hiversity all my right, title and interest to this properly, subje:t,
towever-, to the following exceptiais, access res+1'ictions, and/or
ccnditions:

r

6

s «Qe

This agr ee1e ,t may be revised or anended by rrutual cmsent of the
parties· u ider"signed.
Date of Gift

a.�.�
Intervie.'IIE'e

TtE U,iversity of Kansas accepts this gift of the property and agrees
to the excepticns, access restricticns, and/or ccnditicris, if c:1ny, as stated
above.

Archivist, The Spencer- Library

DEPAR'l'MENT OF ENGLISH, THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
STANDARD FOR-I:

Edwards
Bame

CURBICUWM vr.rAE

8-25-09
, A.C.
First name Date of birtn---.:,oc-. -occ-. "

9-30-74
-- ate furnished or
updated

I. EDUCATION (Degrees, with specialization, dates)
A.B. 1933
English
M.A. 1939
Chaucer
Ph.D. 1941
Chaucer

Title ot Dissertation:

Chaucer and :rtalian HWnanism

Dissertation Chairman:

E. P. KUhl

II. ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS (Department, Institution, Changes of Rank with Dates)
Grad Asst.
Iowa
1938-1940
Instr.
Okla. state
1940-1942
Instr.
Army Air corps 1942-1945
Instr.
u. of Illinois 1945-1946
Assc. Prof.
Okla state
1946-1947
Assc. Prof.
u. of Kansas
1948-1957
Prof.
u. of Kansas
1957----

III. OTHER RELEVANT EXPERIENCE (Other ProtessioneJ. Work, Experience in Admini­
stration, Significant Sojourns at Other Institutions and/or Abroad
Including SabbaticeJ.s, Significant Skills Other than Professional.
Specialties)

1933-1937
social work
Acting Chairman, Dept. of English,
Instructor
Army Air corps

u.

of Kansas

1955
1942-1945

STANDARD FORM: CURRICULUM VITA!

Page Two
Edwards
Name

IV. HONORS (Undergraduate, Graduate, Teaching Awards; Signal Recognition of
Research, e.g., Book Prizes, Inclusion in Anthologies, etc.; Post-Doctoral
Fellowships, Grants from Outside Organizations for Research and Advanced
Studies)
Chaucer article included in Oxford.
of Chaucer articles.

u.

Press anthology

V. COURSES TAUGHT { signify by asterisk those for which your records contain or
you can furnish evaJ.uatiOJilS, either peer or student; list separately any
� courses you s�ccessfm:ly proposed end taught)
comp. and Lit. courses
Hist. Engl. Lit.
Poetry
Chaucer
Shakespeare
Modern Drama
Mod. British Drama
Shaw Seminar
Special Studies in Modern Drama

Page Four

STANDARD FORM: CURRICULUM VITAE

Edwards

Name

VIII. SCHOLARSHIP
List under separate headings as follows :
a) Already Appeared ( Separate into Books, Articles, Reviews, Other)
b) Accepted for Publication (Publisher, Journal, Date, Length)
c) In Progress
d) Papers Presented (Date, Occasion, Title)
e) University General Research Grants Received (Dates, Project Titles)
f) Significant Research Specifically"Entered into to Inaugurate or
Substantially Improve Courses Taught by You.
Appeared:

Papers:

Fulke Greville on Tragedy, LOndon Times Literary Sup.
Knaresborough castle and the Kynges Modres court,
Philological Quarterly: three reviews ih M.D.
Fifteen volumes of Modern Drama
Renaissance Advice Letter, SCMLA, 1940
Intro. to Man of Law's Tale SCMLA, 1946

University General Research Grants

Research to Improve Teaching

1958-1971

Modern Drama

Founded and published Modern Drama

A,'d- ·
· ·
na:'i?e taug ht •
Ia signi f icant research on a 11 the courses I ,_

Page Five

Edwards

STANDARD FORM: CURRICULUM VITAE

Name

IX. PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS (Dates, Tenure o:f Of:fices, Sessions Chaired,
Discussant Participation)
1959-1969
I either chaired or appointed the chairman of
a11 of the MLA sessions on modern drama.

X. SERVICE ( Indicate Dates, Chairmanships, Advising Duties Undertaken)
a) Departmental.

Acting Chairman 1955
Chairman Administrative
Committee
supervisor comp. and Lit.

b) Col.l.ege

c) University

1954
1947-1953

Two terms on College Administrative connnittee

None

d) Comm.unity, State, Nation
Church connnittees
Friends of Library Committee