Rader, Ralph W. 1930-2007 (Ralph Wilson Rader)
Rader, Ralph W. 1930-2007 (Ralph Wilson Rader)
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born May 18, 1930, in Muskegon, MI; died of congestive heart failure, November 23, 2007, in northern CA. Educator and author. Rader spent his entire career as a professor of English at the University of California in Berkeley, from 1956 to 1997. During that time, he developed some controversial views regarding the reputation and origin of the novel as a literary genre. Rader was reportedly one of the first literary scholars in the 1970s to elevate the novel from its status as idle amusement to the level of respectability enjoyed by other forms of serious literature. He also explored the biographical and autobiographical threads running through the fabric of classic and modern novels by such diverse authors as Daniel Dafoe and Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brönte and Jane Austen, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Though his theories remained controversial, Rader was a popular educator whose lectures, it is said, inspired a host of future English professors. His books include Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis (1963), Autobiography, Biography, and the Novel (1973), and New Approaches to Eighteenth Century Literature (1974).
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2007, p. B14.