C. Hugh Holman Papers (#4537) 1930s-1980s

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Summary

Creator:
Holman, C. Hugh (Clarence Hugh), 1914-1981.
Abstract:

C. Hugh Holman (1914-1981), literary scholar specializing in Southern literature, member of the faculty of the English Department of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1949 until retirement in the 1970s, and administrator at the University of North Carolina in various capacities, 1963-1978. The collection includes articles, reviews, speeches, chiefly by Holman, concerning various aspects of Southern literature, including the work of Thomas Wolfe, William Gilmore Simms, and Ellen Glasgow; novels, radio plays, and other works by Holman; teaching and administrative files concerning Holman's work at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the National Humanities Center, the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies, Incorporated, and other organizations; correspondence files concerning Holman's literary and administrative activities; and recordings and photographs.

Extent:
26,000 items (26 linear feet)
Language:
English.
Library Catalog Link:
View UNC library catalog record for this item

Background

Biographical / historical:

Clarence Hugh Holman, son of David Marion and Jessie Pearl Davis Holman, was born in Cross Anchor, S.C., on 24 February 1914. he received his early schooling in Gaffney and Clinton, S.C., before entering Presbyterian College, from which he graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1936. From 1936 to 1939 he was director of public relations for the college, and from 1939 to 1941 director of its radio programs, receiving meanwhile an A.B. degree in English cum laude in 1939. In 1939, he studied radio programming at New York University. From 1939 to 1942 he was on the faculty of Presbyterian College, and in 1945 became its academic dean serving as state publicity director for the Council for National Defense (1942-1944) and as academic coordinator and instructor in physics for the U.S. Army Air Force (1943-1945). As an avocation during these busy years, he published a series of popular mystery novels: Death like Thunder (1942), Trout in the Milk (1946), Up This Crooked Way (1946), Another Man's Poison (1947), and, as "Clarence Hunt,"Small Town Corpse (1951).

But Holman was at heart an educator. In 1946, he entered the University of North Carolina as a graduate student and instructor in English, receiving his doctorate in 1949 with a dissertation on "William Gilmore Simms's Theory and Practice of Historical Fiction"; the same year he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From this time, his rise in the university was rapid. Within a decade he was appointed assistant professor (1949), associate professor (1951), professor (1956), and Kenan Professor (1959). In 1954 he served as an assistant dean and from 1955 to 1957 as acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. From 1957 to 1962 he was chairman of the Department of English, also serving as a member (1957-1973) and chairman (1961-1973) of the Board of Governors of the University Press as a chairman (1959-1962) of the Division of Humanities. From 1963 to 1966 he was dean of the graduate school, from 1966 to 1968 provost, and from 1972 to 1978 a special assistant to the chancellor, organizing and compiling a self-study survey of the university at Chapel Hill.

Holman was the recipient of a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1967), the Thomas Jefferson Award (1975), an award for excellence in writing from Winthrop College (1976), and the Oliver Max Gardner Award (1977). He was awarded a Litt.D. by Presbyterian College in 1963, and a L.H.D. for "dedicated classroom teaching" by Clemson University in 1968. In 1975 he became a member of the board of trustees of the Triangle University Center for Advanced Study, and in 1976 was named chairman of its executive committee. In the latter year he also became a member of the board of trustees, a member of the executive committee, and vice-president of the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park, and in 1980 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Holman was a deacon of the First Presbyterian Church in Clinton and an elder of the Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham.

Known beyond his university for capacities as an administrator, Holman was chairman of the American Literature Section of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (1953-1954); chairman of the bibliographical committee (1957-1961), member of the executive committee (1964-1965), program chairman (1966, 1979), and chairman (1970) of the American Literature Section, and a member of the executive committee of the Twentieth-Century American Literature Group (1978-1981) of the Modern Language Association of America; president of the Southeastern American Studies Association (1958-1959); consultant in English to the U.S. Air Force Academy (1962); and president of the Virginia-North Carolina College English Association (1962-1963). In 1957-1960, he was on the editorial board of College English; in 1967, an advisory editor of the Encyclopedia Americana; in 1968, a founding editor (with Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) of the Southern Literary Journal; and, from 1970, a member of the editorial boards of Essays on Literature and Resources for American Literary Study, and an adviser on American literature for the Encyclopedia of World Literature.

As an inquiring scholar, Holman had as his major interest prose fiction, particularly fiction of the South, a subject which he earned as international reputation for authoritative critical judgments. The author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-six books and some seventy professional articles, he is perhaps most remembered for A Handbook to Literature with W. F. Thrall and Addison Hibbard; Thomas Wolfe (1960), which has been translated into six languages; The Thomas Wolfe Reader (1962); Three Modes of Southern Fiction (1966); The Letters of Thomas Wolfe with Sue Fields Ross (1968); Southern Fiction: Renaissance and Beyond with Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Walter Sullivan (1969); Southern Writing, 1585-1920, with Richard Beale Davis and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (1970); Thomas Wolfe and the Glass of Time, with Richard S. Kennedy and Richard Walser (1971); The Roots of Southern Writing (1972); The Loneliness at the Core; Studies in Thomas Wolfe (1975), winner of the Mayflower Society Award; Southern Literary Study: Promise and Possibilities with Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (1975); The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (1977); and Windows on the World: Essays on American Social Fiction (1979).

On 1 September 1938, Holman married Verna Virginia McCleod of Ocala, Fla., and their children were Margaret McCleod Stroud (b. 1949) and David Marion (b. 1951). Holman was buried in the Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery.

[Taken from Lewis Leary's biography of Holman in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (1988), volume 3, p. 176-177

Scope and content:

The collection includes articles, reviews, speeches, chiefly by C. Hugh Holman, concerning various aspects of Southern literature, including the work of Thomas Wolfe, William Gilmore Simms, and Ellen Glasgow; novels, radio plays, and other works by Holman; teaching and administrative files concerning Holman's work at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the National Humanities Center, the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies, Incorporated, and other organizations; correspondence files concerning Holman's literary and administrative activities; and recordings and photographs.

Custodial history:

Received from the estate of C. Hugh Holman in July 1989.

Processing information:

Final cataloging and housing of this collection are pending.

Encoded by Jackie Dean, 1998

Updated by: Laura Hart, January 2021

Sensitive materials statement:

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Access and use

Restrictions to access:

Access to audio or moving image materials may require production of listening or viewing copies.

Restrictions to use:

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], in the C. Hugh Holman Papers #04537, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Location of this collection:
Louis Round Wilson Library
200 South Road
Chapel Hill, NC 27515
Contact:
(919) 962-3765
wilsonlibrary@unc.edu