Howard Mumford Jones

"I can get quite lyrical about the University of North Carolina," exclaims Howard Mumford Jones, who taught at Chapel Hill from 1925 to 1930; "they're really doing things down there." At Chapel Hill, Jones met Paul Green, the Carolina dramatist; halfway through a performance of Green's "The Field God," in which Jones' daughter took part, Green stalked up to him and chortled: "Gawd ain't this a folk play, it's got hog-guts, killin' 'n everythin' bloody." Professor Jones will vehemently deny any charges that he ever wrote any folk drama.

H. M. Jones, Professor of English and Chairman of the Modern Languages Division, has done just about everything else, however. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, young Jones, after two years at the State Normal School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, attended Wisconsin University where he majored in English, graduating in 1914 with Harvard colleague Sumner Slichter. It was the age of the "Wisconsin Idea;" it was also a time when Mid-Western writers were rebelling against the literary dictation of New York; when the Wisconsin players were presenting plays by Zona Gale. William Leonard, Laura Sherry--and H. M. Jones, the latter already the author of "A Little Book of Local Verse." When Jones received his M.A. at Chicago University in 1915, regionalism was especially strong there, with Harry Hansen, a rising young reviewer on the Chicago News and a group of brilliant young Harvard men at the University. H. M. J. studied with these men; he also served as Hamlin Garland's secretary, and "A Son of the Middle Border" was written on his typewriter.

Thence he moved to the University of Texas, where he taught from 1919 to 1925--a time when, according to Governor Jim Ferguson, Texas was "going hog-wild on higher education." After later teaching at Chapel Hill and Ann Arbor, Professor Jones finally came to Harvard with the Tercentenary ceremonies, in 1936. Besides shepherding 250 youngsters through English 1 this year and introducing first-year graduates to graduate study via English 185, he gives English 52 and English 70 and 170c in his special fields, Victorian Literature and American Literature since 1890. Jones thinks Harvard will get somewhere some day, but warns that "to the outside world, it's Harvard University, not Harvard College, that counts."

Poet and dramatist, student of French culture, Jones is also a critic of note, literary editor of the Transcript during the last two years of its life and frequent contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature. He is now finishing the job of editing the letters of William Makepeace Thackcray, which Gordon was forced to abandon for the Navy last December. Professor Jones hopes to have the edited letters ready by the end of the year, believing they will reval a new Thackeray--the Dr. Johnson of the 19th Century.

A warm, human, robust critic of life as well as literature, H. M. Jones is an inspiring personage. Perhaps some measure of the tolerant breadth and intellectual depth of the man may be indicated by his words of 1939 before the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Committee:

"The way of sanity, the way of practical sense is to assume that we share in the attributes of a common humanity, and out of those common attributes to create the Great Republic of our vision, wherein men shall be men and not cattle to be branded either for breeding purposes or for destruction."

One can get quite lyrical about Professor Jones.