More Honors for Louis J. Budd

Everett Emerson
UNC-Chapel Hill

At the 1998 Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco, the American literature Section awarded Louis J. Budd the Jay B. Hubbell Medallion Award for distinguished service to American literature. The selection committee consisted of Jonathan Arac, Shari Benstock, Judith Fetterly, Eric Sundquist, and Jackson R. Bryer, chair. The citation reviews Professor Budd’s illustrious career and his many honors. Following a summary of his academic career, Bryer writes:

The words which come to my mind after my . . . survey of Lou’s career are modesty and service. Chief among the grants and fellowships he has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965–66 and an NEH Senior Fellowship in 1979–80. At Duke he has directed some thirty Ph. D. dissertations, was director of Undergraduate Studies for four years and Chair of the English Department for six years, 1973–1979. He was also chair of the committee which established Duke’s program in Afro-American studies.

Lou’s chief scholarly subject has been Mark Twain. He is the author of two seminal books, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962) and Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983). His scholarly essays, book chapters, and review essays on Mark twain are by my count number well ever seventy. His A Listing of and Selection from Newspaper and Magazine Interviews with Samuel L. Clemens, 1874-1910, originally published in 1974 and supplemented in 1996, is an invaluable annotated listing of over three hundred interviews with reprintings of several of the most interesting and inaccessible items. Budd has also edited two volumes on Mark Twain in the G. K. Hall Critical Essays series in 1982 and 1983; New Essays on “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” for the Cambridge series; and the Library of America’s two-volume edition of Mark Twain’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays. For ten years, 1976–1985 Louis Budd wrote the Mark Twain chapter for American Literary Scholarship, one of the longest tenures of service or any contributor in the 36-year history of the annual; he contributed the chapter on “Nineteenth-Century Fiction” for four years, 1963–1966. From 1979–1986 he served as managing editor of the journal American Literature, and from 1986 to 1991 was chairman of the Board of Editors. His forthcoming work includes the essay on Mark Twain in American National Biography, the Mark Twain volume in Cambridge University Press’s Critical Archives series, the essay on Mark Twain’s critical reputation in the Oxford Historical Reader’s Companion to Mark Twain, and five volumes of Mark Twain’s social and political writings (one to contain previously unpublished material) for the University of California Press edition of the Works of Mark Twain.

His laurels include honorary degrees from the University of Missouri and Elmira College, recognition as an Honored Life Member of the Mark Twain Circle of America, and the John Hurt Fisher Award for Career Achievement in Letters by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. To these honors, his grateful colleagues in the field of American literary studies are pleased to add the 1998 Hubbell Award. We present it to this good man, this generous, modest man, who has given us so much—in his scholarly work, in his service to our profession. Perhaps the most appropriate manner in which to summarize why we honor Louis J. Budd today is simply to quote the last three words of Alan Gribben’s evaluation of Lou’s 1996 update of his 1977 listing of Mark Twain interviews. Writing in ALS, Gribben said, “Gratitude should abound.” Indeed it should. So thank you, Lou.