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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES Bate, Professor of English, dies at 81
Walter Jackson Bate, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor Emeritus and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, died July 26 of cardiac arrest at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was 81. Born in Mankato, Minn., Bate earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Harvard, where he taught from 1946 until his retirement in 1986. Bate was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for John Keats, a biography of the charismatic 18th-century English poet who died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Praising the biography in a Boston Globe book review, critic Herbert A. Kenney wrote, "This is the best book on John Keats that has ever been done, and it is difficult to see how it could be improved in the scope of a single volume." Bate received his second Pulitzer in 1978 for his biography of Samuel Johnson. The book went on to win the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and appeared in nearly every year-end list of the best books for 1977. His courses "The Age of Johnson" and "The Function and Criticism of Literature" were popular for more than 30 years and drew as many as 400 students. A resident of Cambridge, he also had a home in Amherst, N.H., where he farmed. He wrote, "Unsuccessful farming, I hasten to add. For a few years I actually had a dairy farm of sorts, and then, after continual loss, decided to grow rocks." He leaves a sister, Jane Dear of Raleigh, N.C., and several nieces and nephews.
Copyright 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College |