Robert D. Richardson, whose work as the biographer of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James was acclaimed as "a virtual intellectual genealogy of American liberalism and, indeed, of American intellectual life in general," died on June 16, the New York Times reported. He was 86. Richardson devoted 10 years to researching and writing each of his three biographies, "devouring everything his subjects wrote as well as books they had read."
Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) prompted a fan letter from award-winning author Annie Dillard, and they "ended up marrying in 1988, Ms. Dillard later recalled, after 'two lunches and three handshakes,' " the Times wrote.
His second major work, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, (1995) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006) won the Bancroft Prize for American history, with the jury hailing it as an "intellectual genealogy of American liberalism."
In a piece for the New York Review of Books in 2009, Irish novelist John Banville observed that together the three biographies "form one of the great achievements in contemporary American literary studies.... Aside from his learning, which is prodigious, Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poet's sense of nuance and a novelist's grasp of dramatic rhythm; he also displays a positive genius for apt quotation, the result of a total immersion in the work of his three very dissimilar yet subtly complementary thinkers."
In a recent tribute to Richardson, Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle wrote: "My wish for every young person is that they might find a mentor and role model as suited to their own gifts and shortcomings as Bob was to mine. As a scholar, he was diligent, humble, meticulous and insatiably curious. As a writer, he was charming, lucid and deeply respectful of his readers' time. No writing is good that fails to hold someone's interest, he taught."
Noting that Richardson knew well that "first you catch the reader," Dillard told the Boston Globe: "Bob had the brilliant idea of writing in short takes, very, very short chapters, so that the reader got a sense of accomplishment--he could read five of them at a time or 10 of them or 15 at a stretch.... Everybody liked him. He had a wonderful face and enormous patience. He was a lovely man."