I. Obituary
Pete Messent and Steve Whitfield
Richard H. King, Emeritus Professor in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, died on 19 April 2022 of a long-standing lung complaint. He was eighty years old. Richard was an American intellectual historian of the first order, erudite across disciplines, generous and modest, always encouraging to younger colleagues. Richard had a transatlantic career, ending at the University of Nottingham. He was one of the outstanding scholars and teachers of his generation in his field.
Richard was born on 2 March 1942 in Knoxville, Tennessee, but spent most of his childhood in Chattanooga, where his parents, Dawson and Dorothy King, ran a landscape plant nursery. Richard retained his captivating southern accent throughout his life, but he was no traditionalist and had no time for the too-common nostalgia for the Old South. Rather, it was a concern for racial understanding and justice that drove much of his work. In a 2012 Historical Society interview ‘Why I Became a Historian,’ Richard spoke of the ‘two interests, historically speaking’ which inspired him. The first, developed during the Civil Rights movement, was a need ‘to know the history, …what happened in Reconstruction,’ the better to conduct the argument over race with his friends and others in the South. The other was a long-standing fascination with Nazi Germany, race, and antisemitism. Both together, in his words, engaged the ‘strange (or tragic) fate of defeated people and how that worked out intellectually’. It was this twinned concern that stood as the foundation stone for, and political entry point to, most of his life’s work.
Richard went to Brainerd Junior High School in Chattanooga from 1953 to 1956, then Chattanooga City High School (1956 to 1959). He read history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1959 to 1963, where the quality of the intellectual history teaching helped determine his own disciplinary career choice. After a Fulbright year at Göttingen in 1963-64, which confirmed his Germanophilia, he read for an M.A. in American Studies at Yale (1964-65), followed by his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia (1967-71). Richard then put his racial principles into practice, teaching at Federal City College, later the University of the District of Columbia, a college which specifically attracted Washington’s majority black population, from 1968-83. But a turning point came with his 1977-78 Fulbright year at Nottingham, for he would return to Nottingham in 1983 to spend the rest of his career there, though with time back in the U.S. as Visiting Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi (1989-90), Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. (1997-98), and as Vaughn Fellow in the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University (2001-2003). Richard was a scholar of international repute, playing a full part in Nottingham American Studies Erasmus programme and teaching or researching for short periods in Bogliasco, Italy (2005), Canberra, Australia (2011), Yogyacarta, Indonesia (2016) and Mainz, Germany (2019). Though never a committee man by choice, he served as Chair of the British Association for American Studies from 1992 to 1995. He was one of the Association’s first Honorary Fellows in 2009. He also co-founded, with Michael O’Brien, the very successful (mainly American) intellectual history group. This group was marked by its informality, meeting together to discuss issues, authors and books of mutual concern but, remarkably and laudably, with no thought of publication or professional advancement in mind, just the discussion of ideas for the joy of ideas and discussion’s sake: entirely typical of Richard.
Richard’s first book, The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (1972) explored the connections between political radicalism and psychoanalysis. If he showed little sympathy for the extremist phase of the radicalism of the 1960s, fearing that ideological intensity and the yearning for transcendence risked injecting into civic life something that did not belong there, he never, however, abandoned his support of progressive ideals.
His second book, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (1980) extended his interest in the Freudian legacy but moved directly into Southern studies and literary studies, two vital areas for his career. He explored the psychodynamics of ‘the family romance’ as it connected with the collapse of the old Southern patriarchal order and the various tensions which made Southern literature so provocative and compelling. The Freudian framework of conflict with the fathers kept King from including either black or (except for Lillian Smith) female novelists. But this was nonetheless a book that altered the landscape of Southern literary studies. Richard’s love of William Faulkner, one of the writers studied here, would be life-long. A student who studied under him at Nottingham remembers both Richard’s combination of a ‘melodious accent and elegant knitwear which certainly won additional efforts from many of my female peers,’ and the obsession with Faulkner he inspired. The latter led ‘a small group of fellow students to grow so collectively obsessed with Faulkner that for a period they took to speaking entirely in thunderous Faulknerese themselves!’
The intractable moral and political dilemmas of Southern race relations spurred King’s third book: Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992). Something of a rarity among the retrospective accounts of the movement that started in Montgomery in 1955 and ended in Memphis in 1968, this is an intellectual rather than social or political history, arguing that the differing and evolving meanings of ‘freedom’ among the preachers, students, sharecroppers and others who fought for racial justice enlarged the scope of American politics and the very definition of citizenship. By evoking the voices of the movement as it stretched the boundaries of pluralism, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom constituted ‘an important critique of conventional liberalism,’ according to reviewer Clayborne Carson. King thus found another way to tell one of the crucial stories of twentieth-century America.
If that book was designed to cover one region during one tumultuous decade, his next was his most expansive. Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (2004) once again homed in on a single idea – that the colour line which W.E.B. Du Bois had famously predicted at the outset of the twentieth century would divide it thereafter. But close to half of the book dealt not only with racism but with antisemitism. King showed here how the universalism of the interwar years and mid-century became particularism, how identity politics emerged on the ruins of the dream that “racial (and cultural) differences would fade in light of the assumption that all races enjoyed equal capabilities and aspirations.”
King’s final work, Arendt and America (2015), alone examines a single thinker. Hannah Arendt, a refugee, claimed the heritage of German philosophy. But she lived the second half of her life in the United States, and no previous scholar had looked so closely at how her new life affected her thought. King revealingly incorporated Arendt within the republican tradition, pulling at least one surprise in showing her attraction to John Dewey’s pragmatism. It was the study of Arendt and her writings that dominated his final years.
Richard’s writings were multi-disciplinary and many: on intellectual history, literature, photography, mass culture and much more. All reveal his commitment to exactitude and judiciousness. His breadth, depth and thoughtfulness enriched the study of ideas in America.
Richard was an inspiring presence. He was an outstanding teacher and mentor, able to explain the most complex ideas with lucidity. He was entirely modest and was universally well-liked. He was the most cultured of men with a deep interest in art and music, and a voracious reader. One colleague commented that he ‘was almost always the smartest guy in the room and the kindest,’ a rare combination in academia.
But one cannot recall Richard without mentioning Charlotte Fallenius. Richard’s first marriage to Nancy Landreth ended in 1978. He married Charlotte on 3 September 1988, and they made an ideal partnership, their interests shared, their home open to all their friends and to so many of Richard’s academic colleagues. He leaves Charlotte, her sons Christopher and Tim, and grandchildren David and Anna behind him. He is also survived by his sister, Lynn.
II. Reflections
Tony Hutchison, Áine Mahon, Daniel Matlin, Sharon Monteith, Helen Taylor
Richard H King was a scholar whose work over five decades in a range of disciplines was of genuine international repute. What connected his interests in fields such as political thought, social movement history, modernist literature and psychoanalysis was an overarching passion for intellectual history. Curiously, it was perhaps his Southern U.S. origins that directed this orientation more than his political liberalism, as it was ultimately one that disdained the cool instrumentalism of American Pragmatism in favour of German systems and history/tradition-oriented philosophy. The same history-infused “monumental” leanings—the South, anyone?—were equally evident in Richard’s literary tastes. In sum Hegel, Arendt and Faulkner took precedence over Dewey, Berlin and Hemingway. Richard was truly an intellectual one-off: half Tennessee, half Heidelberg.
Yet Richard’s knowledge of and investment in the American liberal political tradition was also deep and impressive. Race and its fraught history in both the US and Germany were at the heart of this liberal persuasion and a central element in his lifelong scholarly efforts to unpack the civilizational meaning of Jim Crow and the Holocaust.
This all makes Richard sound super-serious, which he was, but in pretty much any company he was also the quickest to smile, the quickest to make a self-deprecating comment, the quickest to try to put people at ease. Moments of mild exasperation were marked, as is the case with the current U.S. president, merely by the baby boomer refrain ‘Man…’ (as in his response to a young pup’s densely theoretical interview presentation on Star Trek: ‘Man, he’s a bright guy, why doesn’t he do Hegel or something?’).
In the painful days since his death though my mind has frequently gone back to a classroom in the 1990s in which a nervous student, lost in the middle of a long wandering contribution to a discussion of Ellison’s Invisible Man, also managed to cough up a piece of unremarkable factual information. With his customary self-deprecation and receptiveness, Richard picked out the factlet from the ramble and replied: ‘That’s interesting…I didn’t know that Tony.’ I now know that it’s rare, to say the least, to find a professor who is openly prepared to confess ‘not to know’ something let alone to do so with the sole aim of alleviating an undergraduate’s feelings of embarrassment and self-reproach. It’s rarer still that the most learned participant at an academic conference is also the most thoughtful and generous in their interactions with the person serving coffee as well as the distinguished guest speaker; but that was invariably the case with Richard.
Man, I’ll miss him.
Tony Hutchison, University of Nottingham
I was so very lucky to have Richard King as one of my Ph.D. supervisors. From the day I met him I felt entirely comfortable in his company – comfortable to voice ideas or possible directions I wasn’t fully sure about. Vulnerability and uncertainty are the hallmarks of every Ph.D. student’s experience but Richard was always so genuine, so gentle, and so kind. He always listened and was always interested in what I had to say (or, at the very least, was very talented at pretending he was interested!!) Richard provided such a supportive space and was simply such a pleasure to be around. I finished my Ph.D. in 2009 and didn’t see Richard again until 2014, when he came to a conference on Philosophy and Literature at University College Dublin. He gave a paper on Hannah Arendt and I remember the whole room being absolutely enthralled. We could have listened to Richard forever. That wonderful voice. I love how he pronounced ‘Derridaaaaaw’!
Mike Collins said, years ago, that Richard King was ‘a prince among men.’ I always remember that because I think it’s exactly right. What an absolute model of brilliance, curiosity, and compassion, and what a standard for the rest of us to live up to. Goodnight sweet prince. Weren’t we all so lucky to have known you.
Áine Mahon, University College Dublin
Richard King’s extraordinary generosity and intellect radiated in many directions over the course of his long career. Colleagues and students at the University of Nottingham, where he worked from the early 1980s and remained as Emeritus Professor after his retirement in 2008, attest to his dedication, kindness and collegiality, and superb teaching. He also served a distinguished term as Chair of the British Association for American Studies from 1992 to 1995. But over the past twenty years, dozens of scholars from around the U.K. and beyond came to know and love Richard via an altogether different setting: an informal reading group that he established and organised with the late Michael O'Brien, my Ph.D. supervisor, who taught U.S. intellectual history at Cambridge and has himself been greatly missed since his passing in 2015.
What began in 2001 as the Intellectual History Group, and continues as the American Thought and Culture Group, has held a precious and unique place in the lives of those of us who have attended its twice-yearly meetings. Amid the intensifying pressures of academia, these occasions have reminded us of the sheer pleasure of learning together, and have fostered precisely the kind of intellectual companionship we can struggle to recapture after we cease to be students in the formal sense. Whether the discussion was of Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, Susan Sontag, or Cormac McCarthy, these meetings were—and will, I believe, continue to be—wonderfully animated by Richard’s egalitarianism and curiosity. He was as attentive to the ideas of a doctoral student at their first session as he was to veteran members of the group.
Like many who came to know Richard through the reading group, I was stunned by his kindnesses towards so many of us at the outset of our careers, including the tremendous care, insight, and encouragement with which he commented on drafts of our work. The immense sensitivity and ethical seriousness that are hallmarks of Richard’s writings were every bit as evident in the way he related to others.
Daniel Matlin, King’s College London
Richard H. King was the best of men. A kind man and an exemplary thinker and scholar.
As Richard was nearing retirement, Dave Murray and I planned an event that would bring together researchers to celebrate interdisciplinary scholarship. Before we sent invitations, Richard decided he didn’t want it to go ahead. Richard did not like to be the centre of attention; he was not self-effacing but simply saw his academic scholarship as part of a much larger conversation. While that was the ethos behind the event, he was uncomfortable with being at its centre.
I valued his friendship. It began while he supervised my Ph.D. and grew while working in the same department. I had applied to the University of Nottingham because Richard was there and have fond memories of conducting seminars together for the Masters in American Studies. Over 2001-2, we held U.S. fellowships and visited back and forth—Christmas at the Peabody in Memphis, Richard’s 60th birthday in Nashville— and always talked books.
In 1989, Richard wrote, “[W]hat we do with a text, how we handle it, depends not so much on what is in it but upon what we want to do with it.” The freedom he exercised across intellectual and literary history, Southern Studies, philosophy, and the cultural and political history of the civil rights movement, translated into rigorous, robust thinking. I was flying back from the U.S. after a long archive trip on the day Richard died, intent on visiting him on my return. The same day, I received an email to say that my most recent book had won the American Studies Network Book Prize. As I read into the judges’ comments—'an example of an American Studies approach par excellence, looking at intersections of politics and culture through social movements and activism, elucidating the everyday and the literary, the scholarly and the vernacular’—I knew I wouldn’t have been a confident interdisciplinary scholar had I not known Richard. I had thanked him in the acknowledgements, and sent him the first copy, because his scholarship on the cognitive and historical value of fiction was an early inspiration, as was his assertion that ‘historical understanding may be enhanced—though never automatically—by a fictional working-through of historical phenomena.’ Richard was persuaded that literature could shed light on ‘certain dimensions of the experience of politics that otherwise might have remained hidden.’ He enriched my thinking. l miss him. But, when mulling over a knotty problem as I write, I often recall, ‘Richard wrote something about this,’ or I sit back and ask myself, ‘I wonder what Richard would think.’
Sharon Monteith, Nottingham Trent University
In my years of working on the American South, I came across Richard King at many conferences and meetings. He was jokingly referred to as a Southern gentleman, but that’s what he was, in the best possible way. Courteous, with a languorous charm and sonorous voice, he was interested in others and always keen to offer ideas, references, contacts – as well as being modest and self-deprecatory. Like many others, I was in awe of his incisive and polymathic intellect, but he never patronised younger scholars and was always eager to share his vast knowledge.
I was on the Board of the Journal of American Studies at the same time as Richard, and he came to the first conference I organised at the University of Warwick, ‘Contemporary Perspectives on U.S. Southern Culture,’ in September 1994. Following that, I asked if he’d be prepared to co-edit a collection of the conference’s essays for Pluto Press. He agreed at once and was a delight to work with – efficient, cooperative and helpful in sharing contacts and ideas. We co-wrote an introduction and he wrote an authoritative Afterword. Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures (1996) reflects the multi-disciplinary scholarly and popular interests in southern writing, history, the arts and music for which Richard was well known.
Although we were never close friends, I always appreciated his respect for women scholars like me, and when I visited him and Charlotte in their Nottingham home, I was touched by the way he described his huge eclectic collection of southern music. An intellectual historian of the best kind, and a lovely person too.
Helen Taylor, University of Exeter (Emeritus)
III. Richard H. King in the Journal of American Studies
From 1985 to 2020, Richard H. King was a prolific contributor to the Journal of American Studies. This was one of the many ways he shaped the intellectual life of BAAS and of the broader field in the United Kingdom. In that time, he wrote 19 book reviews, very often focusing on titles that blurred the boundary between the academic and the popular. In doing so, Richard not only gave the journal’s readers insights into the books’ contents, but also wrestled with their arguments in fundamental ways. From Michael Harrington, Hayden White, and Alfred Kazin to Cornel West, Susan Sontag, and Marilynne Robinson, Richard knew how to act as a transatlantic interlocutor with these towering public intellectuals, often asking questions that reviewers writing for outlets within the United States might have been afraid to ask. During the time he wrote for JAS, Richard also penned three obituaries for the journal: on one of the most significant intellectual influences in his own formation, Richard Rorty, as well as on two friends and mentors in the world of British American Studies: Michael O’Brien, and Brian Lee. Perhaps most significant, though, were his contributions in longer, article-form writing, on Rorty (again), Ralph Ellison, and on the experience of politics in the Civil Rights Movement. All these pieces stand as testament to the originality of Richard’s intellect, and to the interdisciplinarity of his insight, ranging from history, to literature, to philosophy, and back again.
Nick Witham, Co-Editor-in-Chief
The full list of Richard H. King's works published in JAS can be found below:
Toward a Democracy of Seeing: William Eggleston and the Achievement of Southern Photography, Volume 54, Issue 3
Obituary: Brian Lee, Volume 54, Issue 2
“Knowing Movement, Wanting Order”: Michael O'Brien on the US South, Volume 50, Issue 3
Marilynne Robinson, Home (London: Virago Press, 2008, £18.99). Pp. 325. ISBN978 1 84408 549 1., Volume 43, Issue 2
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same, Volume 42, Issue 2
IN MEMORIAM: RICHARD RORTY (1931–2007), Volume 42, Issue 1
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005, $14.95). Pp. xv+228. ISBN 0 393 05213 3., Volume 41, Issue 1
Christoph Irmscher. The Poetics of Natural History (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1999, $42). Pp. 335. ISBN 0 8135 2615 9., Volume 35, Issue 1
The Uncreated Conscience of My Race/The Uncreated Features of His Face: The Strange Career of Ralph Ellison, Volume 34, Issue 2
Alfred Kazin, Writing Was Everything (Cambridge and London: Harvard, 1995, $17.95. £11.50). Pp. 152. ISBN 0 674 96237 0., Volume 30, Issue 2
Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography (Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell, 1994, £19.99). Pp. 448. ISBN 0 631 16415 4., Volume 30, Issue 1
Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1993, n.p.). Pp. 308. ISBN 0 415 90486 2., Volume 29, Issue 1
Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common Sense (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, $29.95). Pp. 257. ISBN 0 253 34895 1., Volume 27, Issue 2
Present at the Creation: Marcus Cunliffe and American Studies, Volume 26, Issue 2
Response to Alun Munslow, Volume 26, Issue 1
The Discipline of Fact/The Freedom of Fiction?, Volume 25, Issue 2
Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, £17). Pp. 244. ISBN 0 8018 2937 2., Volume 23, Issue 1
Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–39: Equivocal Commitments (London: Macmillan, 1987, £27.50). Pp. 260. ISBN 0 333 39176 4, Volume 22, Issue 2
Citizenship and Self-Respect: The Experience of Politics in the Civil Rights Movement, Volume 22, Issue 1
Gerald E. Meyers, William James: His Life and Thought (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1986, £30), Pp. 614. ISBN 0 300 03417 2., Volume 21, Issue 3
Michael Harrington, The New American Poverty (London: Firethorn Press, 1985, £10.95). Pp. xii, 271. ISBN 0 947752 21 8., Volume 20, Issue 3
“In Other Words”: The Philosophical Writings of Richard Rorty, Volume 19, Issue