John Seelye

John Seelye, a distinguished scholar of American literature, died on April 20, 2015. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1953 and his Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School in 1961. He served in the United States Navy as a lieutenant during the Korean War. John was a graduate research professor of American literature at the University of Florida. Before that, he had been Distinguished Alumni Service Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had also taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of California, Berkeley. John’s published work includes scholarship, criticism, and fiction, among which are Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970), The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1970), The Kid (1972), Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (1977), and Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755-1825 (1991). John received a Guggenheim and two NEH fellowships for his ongoing work on the river in American culture, one of the latter being at AAS during the 1985-86 cycle. He contributed to the Society in many other ways over the years, donating many of the oil paintings that grace the walls of the Goddard-Daniels House.