Harrison M. Hayford

Hayford's early life was spent on the Hayford Farm, which was established in 1821 and was in 1859 made the town Poorhouse Farm.

Ralph Hayford, his father, was the oldest of five surviving children (of eight).

Harrison Hayford was born in Belfast, Maine, son of Ralph Hayford (1881 - 1945) and Marjorie Chase Hayford.

He had two sisters, Viola (Glass), and Marion, who died of tuberculosis as a child.

After his mother died shortly after childbirth in 1891, Ralph took over responsibility from his bereaved father, Loretto, and remained on the farm to raise his four younger siblings.

One of Harrison's students later speculated that his love of story and language was nurtured by listening to the retired seamen who were taken into the poorhouse.

The farm was auctioned by the county, however, when the family could not pay the taxes.

Harrison Mosher Hayford (b. Belfast, Maine 1 November 1916 - d. 10 December 2001 Evanston, Illinois) was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor.

Hayford attended a one-room school where his mother was the teacher, then graduated from Crosby High School in 1937.

He entered Tufts College, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English in 1938 and 1940.

His undergraduate roommate was the poet John Ciardi.

Their shared interest in poetry was sharpened by John Holmes, a nationally respected poet who taught at Tufts.

Holmes held a weekly poetry reading and discussion session in his apartment, where Hayford and Ciardi met Josephine Bosworth Wishart, a graduate student whom both courted.

In the spring of 1938 Hayford and Wishart eloped by street-car to Providence, where they married.

Hayford was among the students recruited by Yale English professor Stanley T. Williams for his graduate program in American literature.

Although Williams did little publication on the subject himself, he encouraged these graduate students to focus on Melville.

The group did research in archives and libraries in order to move beyond the first generation of studies, which treated Melville's writings as reliably autobiographical.

The Yale students became key players in the Melville Revival of the 1940s.

Among them were Walter Bezanson and Merton M. Sealts (Sealts had been a classmate of Hayford's wife at Wooster College).

Hayford had intended to write his doctoral thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson, but when he found that he could not gain access to crucial archival papers, he turned to Melville.

His dissertation on the relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne has been called “seminal." Hayford discovered letters, journal extracts, and other materials which he later included in articles.

He and Josephine had four children: Charles Wishart Hayford (1941- ), Ralph Harrison Hayford (1944- 2002), Alison Margaret Hayford (1946- ), and Deborah Bosworth Hayford (Weiss) (1950 - ).

Hayford taught freshman composition, graduate seminars, and undergraduate courses in new areas, such as African American literature, folk-lore, and individual American authors.

After the war, he was one of the "young turks" in the English Department who worked to put freshman English at the center of a humanistic curriculum.

He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986.

He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.

G. Thomas Tanselle surveyed the scholarship about Herman Melville over the twentieth century and concluded that "Harrison Hayford has been responsible for more basic work —from the maintenance of a file of secondary material to the production of critical editions—than anyone else”.

He joined the English department of Northwestern University in 1942 and retired after 44 years of teaching there in 1986.

Along with his Northwestern colleagues Wallace Douglas and Ernest Samuels, he was called one of the “early animators and contributors” to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, formed in 1949.

Hayford received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1951; a Fulbright Fellowship in 1956-1957, which he spent in Florence, Italy; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, which he spent in Paris, France.

He helped found and served four terms as president of the Melville Society.

His 1952 freshman English anthology, Reader and Writer, edited with fellow Melville scholar Howard P. Vincent, became one of the bestselling English composition texts of its time.

Selections included essays, short fiction, and poems ranging from the early English poet Bernard Mosher to contemporary writers.

He also was visiting professor at University of Minnesota, University of Washington, Seattle, University of Florence, 1956-1957, Harvard University 1962, University of Maine, and University of Paris, Sorbonne, 1977-1978.

Among the Northwestern colleagues with whom he had close friendships were Carl W. Condit, Wallace Douglas, Richard Ellman, Leon Forrest, Ernest Samuels, Walter Bernard Scott, and Samuel Schoenbaum.

He edited The Somers Mutiny Affair (1959), a selection of historical documents concerning the 1793 Somers mutiny which students could use as a resource for essays.

Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie and the mutiny may have been in Melville's mind when he wrote Billy Budd.

Hayford's influence in the Melville field came without his having written an influential early book establishing him as an authority.

His student, Hershel Parker, wrote that "he did it his way."

He never published his Yale doctoral thesis on the relation between Melville and Hawthorne, but Melville scholars read it in manuscript and it is called "seminal".