William White (academic)

Born in Paterson, New Jersey,[1] White was trained at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (BA, 1933), the University of California, Los Angeles (MA, 1937), and the University of London (PhD, 1953).[2]

White taught Journalism and American Studies at Wayne State University from 1947 to 1980,[3] and set up and chaired the journalism program at Oakland University.[4] Before retiring in 1981, he also taught in colleges in California, Washington, Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island.[5]

In parallel with his academic career, he held a job as reporter, columnist and editor of more than a dozen daily and weekly newspapers in Chattanooga, Los Angeles and Detroit,[5] covering a wide range of topics including sports and auto racing for the Detroit area newspapers.[4] Each year White edited a special Whitman section of the Long Islander, the newspaper founded by Walt Whitman with whom he shared a newspaperman's concern with the condition of American literature.[4] He was the editor of the Walt Whitman Review for twenty-six years, and co-editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review for six years and its editor emeritus from 1989 until his death in 1995.[6] He was also the bibliographer of The Hemingway Review for seventeen years, from 1970 until the fall of 1988.[7] The lead item in the first issue of Hemingway notes (spring 1971) was his supplement to Audre Hanneman's Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1967), to which he contributed a ten-page list of articles published about Hemingway between 1966 and 1970.[7]

In addition to writing thousands of academic articles on many American and British authors, including John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, A. E. Houseman and W. D. Snodgrass,[6] White published over forty books, including By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967), which was translated into fourteen languages and made the New York Times best-seller list.[8] In Walt Whitman's Journalism (1968), he was the first to demonstrate the extent and variety of Whitman's accomplishments in journalism.[4] He returned to Hemingway's journalism by publishing Dateline: Toronto (1985), a collection of stories Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star between 1920 and 1924.[9] In 1969, White was credited with possessing the world's largest collection of published works by Hemingway.[10]

After retiring in 1981, he taught in Israel and in Florida, lived briefly in California, and settled for a while near the University of Virginia, returning to Michigan when his health deteriorated.[11]

White married Gertrude Mason (1915–2009) in 1952.[12] They lived in England while he completed doctoral study at the University of London and then settled in Franklin, Michigan when he took a position teaching Journalism and American Studies at Wayne State University. They had two sons, Geoffrey and Roger, and three granddaughters.[12][13]

He won a Fulbright of American Literature to Korea in 1963-1964, several National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1984.[5][13][14]

• By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
• Walt Whitman's Journalism: A bibliography (1969)
• The Merrill guide to Ernest Hemingway (1969)
• The Merrill checklist of Ernest Hemingway (1970)
• Edwin Arlington Robinson: a Supplementary Bibliography (1971)
• Nathanael West: A comprehensive bibliography (1975)
• The Bicentennial Walt Whitman : essays from the Long-Islander (1976) – edited by William White
• The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Daybooks and Notebooks (1978)
• Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass. A Textual Variorum Of The Printed Poems 1870-1891 (1980) – 3 vol. Edited by Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, William White
• 1980, Leaves of grass at 125 : eight essays (1980) – edited by William White
• Dateline: Toronto (1985)

• Search entries for "William White" at the Resources page of The Walt Whitman Archive.
• Search entries for "William White" at the University of Iowa's Institutional Repository.