Daniel Aaron, Pioneer in American Studies, Dies at 103

Daniel Aaron, an emeritus professor at Harvard and an academic who helped develop the field of American Studies, died Saturday at Mt. Auburn Hospital at the age of 103 because of pneumonia complications.

Aaron spent his undergraduate years at the University of Michigan. In 1943, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard, becoming the first student in the University’s history to study in that program.

Before coming to Harvard, Aaron spent three decades teaching American Studies at Smith College. Subsequently, Aaron held the title of Victor S. Thomas professor of English and American literature emeritus at Harvard University. He taught at Harvard from 1971 to 1983.

While at Harvard, he taught Harvard underclassmen, including future president John F. Kennedy ’40, who wrote a “so-so examination paper for a Harvard American literature course.”

Aaron was the founding president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. The Library of America has published more than 200 volumes written by American authors, ranging from Mark Twain to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Throughout his career, Aaron published extensively, writing about literature, history, and American culture. He published his first scholarly paper, “Melville and the Missionaries,” in 1935. His most recent work, published in 2007, is an autobiography titled “The Americanist.”

“The United States suddenly loomed as the last democratic bastion in the world after the German occupation of France in 1940. About then, I began to feel that it might be almost as important to understand American civilization as to preserve it,” he wrote in “The Americanist.”

Helen Vendler, an American literary academic, said Aaron was “a chief founder of the discipline of American studies” in a 2012 interview with Harvard magazine, adding that he “advocated the scholarly study of American authors at a time when universities still emphasized English and European literature.”

Aaron also contributed to the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the London Review of Books.

Aaron was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Humanities Medalist.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he was born in Chicago, but spent his later years living in Cambridge.

Aaron’s son, Jonathan Aaron, has also pursued a career in the humanities. He holds a doctorate from Yale University and teaches in the department of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College.

—Staff writer Ignacio Sabate can be reached at ignacio.sabate@thecrimson.com . Follow him on Twitter @ignacio_sabate.