I was deeply saddened to hear that John Idol had died (26 February 2021). He was a professor at Clemson University from 1964 until his retirement in 1995. He was an all-around wonderful person: kind, intelligent, and generous. A veritable Southern gentleman, John was at one of the first Hawthorne talks I gave, and he encouraged me to pursue my ideas, and that gave me confidence. Later, he and Melinda Ponder asked me to submit an essay on Hawthorne and Edith Wharton to their groundbreaking collection, Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition (U of Mass P, 1999). He also published, with Buford Jones, a most helpful collection of contemporaneous reviews of Hawthorne's work, a collection to which I frequently refer: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 1994). With Rita Gollin, and with the assistance of Sterling Eisiminger, John wrote Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Knowledge and Uses...
