34 Facts About Richard Marius

Richard Curry Marius was an American academic and writer.

Richard Marius was a scholar of the Reformation, novelist of the American South, speechwriter, and teacher of writing and English literature at Harvard University.

Richard Marius was widely published, leaving behind major biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther, four novels set in his native Tennessee, several books on writing, and a host of scholarly articles for academic journals and mainstream book reviews.

Richard Marius was born in Dixie Lee Junction, Tennessee, on July 29,1933, and grew up on a 20-acre farm in Loudon County, Tennessee, along with a sister and two brothers.

Richard Marius's father was an immigrant from Greece who earned a chemical engineering degree in Belgium before settling in the United States, where he managed the foundry at the Lenoir Car Works of the Southern Railway.

Richard Marius's mother was a former reporter for The Knoxville News-Sentinel in the 1920s and 1930s.

Richard Marius' mother, Eunice, was a devout Southern Baptist and fundamentalist Christian whose religious faith had a particularly strong influence over him.

Richard Marius even felt a calling to be a minister, earning a divinity degree.

Richard Marius was particularly affected by Stace's essay Man Against Darkness, which includes the statement that:.

Richard Marius then enrolled in a divinity program at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary despite an increasing crisis of faith.

Richard Marius successfully pushed to end the university's practice of holding sectarian religious convocations.

Richard Marius wrote his first novel, The Coming of Rain, published in 1969.

In 1978, Richard Marius joined Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he was the director of the Expository Writing Program from 1978 to 1998.

Richard Marius spent the last twenty years of his life at Harvard, producing most of his major work there, including his biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther and his final two novels.

Richard Marius taught a lecture course on William Shakespeare's history plays and a freshman-only seminar on Southern writers, focusing on Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Richard Marius served as a tutor and thesis advisor to numerous students.

Richard Marius coached the students charged with delivering annual commencement addresses each year and helped Harvard's presidents develop their graduation speeches.

In 1993, Richard Marius was awarded the Harvard Foundation Medal for his efforts to improve racial relations.

Richard Marius succeeded, turning in the final manuscript several months before he died at his home on November 5,1999.

Richard Marius had previously written, without pay, several speeches for his fellow Tennessee native, including a 1993 Madison Square Garden oration for the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and parts of Gore's 1994 Harvard commencement address attacking the "culture of cynicism".

Richard Marius accepted the offer to join the White House, took an eighteen-month leave of absence from Harvard, rented out his home, and prepared to move to Washington, DC.

Richard Marius told Gore, his former student when Gore was an undergraduate at Harvard, to reverse the hiring; Gore complied.

Richard Marius wrote four novels based in East Tennessee from roughly 1850 to 1950.

Richard Marius's second novel, Bound for the Promised Land, is a stand-alone work.

Richard Marius later converted it into a stage play, which was produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998.

Richard Marius is haunted by the ghosts of three friends who died in the war.

Richard Marius wanted to title the novel "Once in Arcadia", but his publisher believed that too few readers would understand the reference to the classical Greek refuge.

Richard Marius completed his last and perhaps most autobiographical novel, An Affair of Honor, several months before his death.

Richard Marius judged his subjects from a modern perspective, criticizing More for religious fanaticism and intolerance because he persecuted heretics, and criticizing Luther for his anti-Semitic writings, for example.

Richard Marius translated from Latin More's Utopia and co-edited three volumes of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More.

Richard Marius served as director of Harvard's Expository Writing Program for sixteen years.

Richard Marius developed the program's curriculum, hired much of its teaching staff, and wrote two books about writing.

Richard Marius asked his students to revise their drafts repeatedly, each time trying to communicate more simply and with fewer and shorter words.

Richard Marius advised making a rough outline before beginning to write and getting to the point quickly by setting up in the opening paragraph tensions that will be resolved by the end.