Albert J. Guerard
Albert Joseph Guerard (1914–2000) was an American critic, novelist, and professor. He was born in Houston, Texas, and educated at Stanford University, (B.A. 1934), (Ph.D. 1938) and Harvard University, (M.A. 1936). Life. Guerard was born in Houston in 1914. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1934 from Stanford and a master's from Harvard in 1936. He taught for a year at Amherst College before earning his doctorate from Stanford in 1938. He taught at Harvard from 1938 to 1961, where his students included Alice Adams, John Hawkes, Alison Lurie, and Robert Crichton. He served in  the Army from 1943 to 1945 as a Technical Sergeant in the psychological warfare branch. He moved to Stanford in 1961 where he launched the university's first freshman seminar program, which ran for 13 years. As many as 400 students were involved in it annually. He also worked to get funding for the "Voice Project", a program that brought professional writers to campus to teach freshmen. He succeeded Yvor Winters in the literature chair named after Guerard's father, Albert Léon Guérard, who was also a professor at Stanford for many years. He remained at Stanford until 1985. His  students included writers John Hawkes, Frank O'Hara and Harriet Doerr. His interest in modernism and postmodernism led him to develop Stanford's interdisciplinary doctoral program in "Modern Thought and Literature", which still exists. After suffering from emphysema for many years, he died in the same room where his father had died 41 years before. Work & awards. Guerard published nine novels, six books of criticism and a memoir called "The Touch of Time: Myth, Memory and the Self", as well as a number of critical essays. He was preparing to submit a volume of some of his critical writing for publication  when he died. His novels include "Night Journey", which drew from his experience in psychological warfare intelligence during World War II. His critical books include "The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky and Faulkner", which looks at three authors who broke away from realism. He held the record for the most novels written by any living U.S. critic and the most critical books of any living American novelist. He received a 1977-78 Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for distinguished teaching and a 1983 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. In 1998, Guerard received an Academy Award  in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Quotes. Once asked whether he thought it was possible to teach creative writing, Guerard said: "Yes, so long as the writer-teacher doesn't think of it as a matter of techniques to be passed on, tricks of the trade, formulas for success. The process is empirical. Every genuine writer has a voice of his own -- an inward voice that stems from his temperament as well as from experience. The experienced teacher listens to that voice, helps bring it out." He was also asked whether it was unusual for a  writer to be both novelist and literary critic: "I suppose it is," he replied. "Yet there is the same psychologizing bent in both kinds of writing the same interest and ambiguity. And both kinds of writing have had a very marked effect on my teaching." In a 1982 Phi Beta Kappa address, Guerard talked about the role of literature and the humanities in respect to the real world (specifically, in this case, the possibility of nuclear holocaust): "We have Caspar Weinberger and others suggesting that we can 'prevail' in a protracted war in spite of 50 or 100 million Americans  dead. At an intellectual level, this suggests a failure to consult history, and the lesson that governments do not survive catastrophic defeat, which nuclear war would do to both sides. At a visual level, it is a failure to see what 50 or 100 million deaths 'look like.' . . . The greatest writers take us beyond our common sense and selective inattention, even to paradoxical sympathy with the lost and the damned take us, that is, to the recognition of humanity in its most hidden places."