Richard Altick

Richard Daniel Altick (September 19, 1915 – February 7, 2008) was an American literary scholar, known for his pioneering contributions to Victorian Studies, as well as for championing both the joys and the rigorous methods of literary research.

Life

Altick was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an area he would later recall in Of a Place and a Time (1991). He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1936 and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 with a dissertation on the 18th-century poet Richard Owen Cambridge.

He returned to Franklin and Marshall in 1941 to teach, but in 1945 joined the English faculty of Ohio State University, where he would remain until his retirement in 1982. Altick's graduate course in bibliography and research methods, English 980, became known for the strenuous demands he made upon his students. Many of the materials developed for that course found their way into The Art of Literary Research, published in 1963. Ohio State would ultimately bestow upon Altick the title of Regents Professor of English, the only member of the English department to be so honored.

Despite infirmities that made writing difficult in his last years, he persisted in reviewing books for such papers as the Times Literary Supplement, maintaining correspondence, and assisted other scholars with their work.

Works

One of Altick's most enduringly popular books was written during his first years at Ohio State: The Scholar Adventurers (1950), a title he coined to describe the literary detectives whose work was resulting in new discoveries about James Boswell, Christopher Marlowe, and other major figures in English literature.

When Altick began writing about Victorian Britain in the 1950s, the subject had received scant scholarly attention.