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J. A. Leo Lemay was an eighteenth-century man who somehow stepped out of the coffeehouses of the metropolis into the twentieth century. All of the qualities that adorned the town wits of the British Enlightenment (Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and their ilk) were his. He was sociable, opinionated, Whiggish, well-read, worldly, patriotic, energetic, humorous, skeptical, theatrical, learned, and professional. His appetites were robust; his curiosity, imperial. He relished low humor but could appreciate refined sentiments. He was unembarrassed in the expression of his views, which could be pungently critical or effusively commendatory. He did not like ideologues, reformers, slackers, placemen, or poseurs. Yet his capacity for friendship was so large that persons whose politics were entirely inimical counted him an ally. He preferred empirical findings to theoretical suppositions, science to religion, and good manners to moral righteousness. He had a taste for old rituals: traditional Christmases, toasts around the table, cigars after dinner, college investitures. Yet he loved new media. He may have been the first literary historian of his generation to make available a research database on the World Wide Web, the often-cited “Benjamin Franklin: A Documentary History.” He revered the durability of learning and the role of scholarship in preserving a culture’s consciousness for the future. Yet he believed in living one’s days richly in the moment. Whether his philosophy of living was Epicurean or hedonist is an irresolvable question. All that can be said with certainty is that the flesh he delighted in for so many years faltered under the strain of living large and ultimately failed him. J. A. Leo Lemay died of heart failure at home, surrounded by his family, on October 15, 2008.

At the time of his death, Lemay probably knew more about early American writing in English than any scholar who has ever lived. The other great extensive readers of early Anglo-American letters—Lawrence Wroth, who helmed the John Carter Brown Library early in the twentieth century, Ralph Rusk, professor at Columbia University, Perry Miller at Harvard University, and Richard Beale Davis at the University of Tennessee in the mid-twentieth century—lacked the bibliographic and institutional means or inclination (in Miller’s case) to range as widely as Lemay in their investigations. Like Wroth, Rusk, and Davis, Lemay enjoyed the advantage of being formed as a scholar outside of the preoccupations of the New England school. At the University of Maryland (where he took a B.A. and M.A.) and the University of Pennsylvania (where he earned his Ph.D.), his interests were shaped by the Enlightenment comparative literature scholar A. Owen Aldridge, the bibliographer Charles Mish, and the intellectual historian of science Theodore Hornberger. All were early transatlanticists. None were genealogists of American civil religion, interested in establishing a national paternity in the Puritan errand. Their teaching had little to do with the exposition of a canon. Mish inspired Lemay with the vision of early American letters as a vast terra incognita in need of exploration. So Lemay became heir to that expansively adventurous spirit of literary recovery that Charles Evans and Clifford Shipton had pioneered in cataloging the Early American Imprints series. From Aldridge, the author of Man of Reason: The Life of Tom Paine (1959) and Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (1965), Lemay appropriated intellectual biography as a means of illuminating cultural or intellectual history. In the work of Hornberger, Lemay encountered a way of arguing for the cultural importance of intellectual developments in areas besides religion and politics. These three influences intermingled to produce a scholarship that was enormously ambitious and, despite its recognizably academic cast, strikingly novel.1

Penn supplemented Lemay’s training in intellectual history, biography, and bibliography with schooling in textual editing and political history. These disparate abilities produced creative dissonance in his scholarship. He began his career publishing a study of an early electrical experimentalist, Ebenezer Kinnersley, Franklin’s Friend. Intellectual biography demands research into familiar letters and written records that express or document the evolution of a mind during a lifetime. So he immersed himself in the manuscript archives of eighteenth-century America. When he turned to bibliography, constructing his landmark, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines and in the Major English Magazines through 1765, he had none of the myopic preoccupation with imprints that blinkered Evans and scholars that depended upon the Early American Imprints series. His bibliography recognized the extent to which poems that came to print had been composed in a world dominated by oral and manuscript productions to which the printed verses replied. Lemay did not limit his investigations to the printed pages of periodicals; in order to adduce authorship and to understand contexts, he read everything in every repository, printed or manuscript, with the slightest pertinence, making the notes to his Calendar entries a trove of information. Paradoxically, Lemay’s bibliographic work dismantled the notion that meaningful literary commerce was a thing registered primarily in print.2

Lemay demonstrated what could be done with the new paradigm of literary commerce in a series of landmark articles that examined the interplay of spoken, manuscript, and print expressions: “Hamilton’s Literary History of the Maryland Gazette,” “Richard Lewis and Augustan American Poetry,” and “Robert Bolling and the Bailment of Colonel Chiswell.” Each brought into view a writer, a provincial literary scene, a network of related texts, and a political or cultural problem. They were the first thick descriptions of British American literary culture and made Lemay a name in historical as well as literary historical circles.3

Looking back on these early pieces now reveals that they strikingly typify the signal features of Lemay’s work. They are chunky with quotation, exhaustive in their treatment of their subjects (at forty-four pages, the Bolling article remains the longest piece ever published by Early American Literature), impatient with the general state of ignorance about early American letters by scholars, and insistent in the importance of the matters being treated for understanding the development of American letters. Judgments abound. And the author is unembarrassed about putting himself forward as an authority. The prose is instrumental rather than eloquent and entirely lacking in metaphor, simile, or poetic figuration of any sort. Only in his final works—in the three volumes of the Franklin biography he managed to finish before his death—did he work his prose to some degree of stylishness. Lots of facts and lots of voices sound in the pages bearing Leo’s name. Perhaps he was rhetorically obtrusive because there was so much else competing with his “I” for the reader’s attention. His readings and narratives do not depend much on theoretical framings, constructing narratives inductively.

Leo’s antipathy to theory became rather notorious in the early 1990s. I asked him if there were any movements of Continental thinking that he favored. He said he admired some of the initiatives of the Annales School. Given the Marxist underpinnings of the Annalistes, I was surprised, but it made sense, given their penchant for scholarship as a form of neo-Antiquarian assemblage. I use Antiquarian here not in a pejorative sense but in its original sense, propounded when the Antiquarians emerged in the 1580s to counter the tendentiousness of writers on English history. The antiquarians evaded the insistent Protestant Nationalism of history with chorographies, itineraries, and chronicles. They favored geographically organized amalgams of facts, texts, and observations without their meaning rhetorically amplified. A reader could frame his or her own histories out of the archives the authors published. Lemay is most an annaliste/antiquarian in his Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland, a prosopography of the colony’s writers from its founding to the American Revolution. In an instant, it made Annapolis the most richly imagined literary scene in British America. Through this book, the “focus on the locus” became established as an approach to the history of literary culture. It made my generation of scholars attend to “scenes” of activity and attempt reconstructions of conversations and communities. It remains a powerful kind of inquiry among cultural historians of early letters. Think of the work of Susan Stabile, Karin Wulf, Catherine Kaplan, Bryan Waterman, and Sarah Knott.4

Yet I would misrepresent Leo if I argued that his scholarship presented his findings innocent of “tendencies.” He was a nationalist of the type whose political convictions were fully formed before the outbreak of the Vietnam War. He viewed the founding charters of the United States as the best hope of happiness for “the people” and the various forms of totalitarianism as inimical to it. Interestingly, his sense of “the American people” was greatly influenced by 1930s leftist populists and folklorists, with their celebrations of common workers, frontiersmen, farmers, and laborers. He occasionally made his own contributions to this literature, most notably in his book New England’s Annoyances: America’s First Folk Song (1985) and in articles on southwestern humor and the American genesis of “Yankee Doodle.” Native Americans appeared less conspicuously in his scholarship, despite his being a collector of traditional Navajo pottery. Yet he read deeply in the anthropological literature of the southeastern tribes in order not to misrepresent the interactions of the Native peoples with Captain John Smith, Robert Beverly, Robert Bolling, and Benjamin Franklin, the four Anglo-Americans who dominated Lemay’s historical imagination.5

Intellectual biography was Leo’s favorite way of examining change in culture. All four of his favorite subjects shared antipathies to aristocratic privilege, a desire to establish institutions in North America that would secure rights and property, an ambition for fame, and a resistance to Reformed Christianity. All were “myriad-minded” with interests in matters other than politics and property. All possessed an elaborate sense of history. Lemay’s Smith was less a bumptious imperialist than a champion of the promise of self-mastery in America for Europe’s common people. Lemay’s Beverly was not a plantation grandee but the leader of the plant-cutters revolt against state prerogative and an Enlightened deist. Lemay’s Bolling was not the English educated scion of Virginia’s plantocracy so much as the Virginian who saw the privileged orders on both sides of the Atlantic as a lawless set, intent on their own control of wealth and power. Lemay’s Franklin was a greatly complicated man, who managed to wrest wisdom from a welter of philosophies and experiences. Lemay researched their lives deeply and in the case of Bolling and Franklin knew what each did and said to the day. Leo’s death before completing the five volumes of his biography of Benjamin Franklin is profoundly disappointing because it is the final decades of Franklin’s life that stand in greatest need of detailed expounding. The three volumes that have issued from the press are an unsurpassed chronicle of the formation of British America’s most effective transatlantic personality.

There was much Lemay knew that never found its way to paper. The file cabinets in his office at the University of Delaware contained extraordinary treasures—manila folders collecting the works of poets who have never been read since the eighteenth century, such as John Mascarene, Henry Hulton, John Beveridge, Rev. Thomas Bacon, and drafts of editions of the works of poet Richard Lewis, Joseph Green, and Robert Bolling. He took extensive notes on writers in Barbados and Antigua. Fortunately, he trained a talented cohort of scholars, who absorbed certain of his enthusiasm and went on to explore areas beyond Leo’s ambit of interests: Carla Mulford, Kevin J. Hayes, Susan Stabile, James Hutchinson, Robert Micklus, Thomas J. Haslam, Karen Schramm, Nanette C. Tamer.

I never studied with Leo. Yet I belong to that less exclusive body of early Americanists who count themselves beneficiaries of Leo’s knowledge and largesse. There was a period in the mid-1980s, before email became widespread, when I corresponded with him weekly. Like Franklin, Leo Lemay believed in the sociable sharing of thoughts and interests. The parties he hosted at conferences were a central—some would say the central—node in the professional network of early American literature scholars prior to the formation of the Society of Early Americanists by Leo’s student Carla Mulford. Leo would introduce a newly minted Ph.D. to the luminaries in the field, hand the newbie a bourbon to loose inhibitions and tongue, and boom observations in his memorable adenoidal baritone into the flow of talk, making sure it never flagged. Community was formed. The community thrives. Indeed it has grown so big and so diverse in its interests that there are those who have no inkling of Leo’s contributions in the creation of this discursive space in which we work—his hand in the creation of Early American Literature—or his presence in 1965 at the founding of the MLA Division of American Literature before 1800. He was there. He is no longer here. As they said in seventeenth-century Boston, “A great tree has fallen in Zion.”

David S. Shields
University of South Carolina

1. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia, 1959); Aldridge, Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man (Philadelphia, 1965).

2. Lemay, Ebenezer Kinnersley, Franklin’s Friend (Philadelphia, 1964); Lemay, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines and in the Major English Magazines through 1765 (Worcester, Mass., 1970–1972).

3. Lemay, “Hamilton’s Literary History of the Maryland Gazette,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 23, no. 2 (April 1966): 273–85; Lemay, “Richard Lewis and Augustan American Poetry,” PMLA 83, no. 1 (March 1968): 80–101; Lemay, “Robert Bolling and the Bailment of Colonel Chiswell,” Early American Literature 6, no. 2 (Fall 1971): 99–142.

4. Lemay, Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland (Knoxville, Tenn., 1972).

5. Lemay, New England’s Annoyances: America’s First Folk Song (Newark, Del., 1985).