English Professor Albert Guerard's autumn Saturdays were not spent grading papers, critiquing literary works or writing his memoirs. They were reserved for a less erudite pursuit.
"He was crazy about Stanford sports," Thomas Moser, emeritus professor of English, told Stanford Report in December. "Until the very end, Saturday afternoon was sacred--he would be watching Stanford football on TV."
Novelist, essayist and mentor to such notable writers as John Updike, Alison Lurie and Alice Hoffman, Guerard died at his campus home November 9 of emphysema. He was 86.
The son of a Stanford English professor, Guerard followed campus sports from an early age. "Athletics . . . filled our days and our dreams," he wrote of his childhood in the memoir Touch of Time. "Our afternoon games were strictly governed by Stanford [sports] schedules."
At Stanford, Guerard competed on the football and track teams while nurturing his gift for writing. Working at the Daily, he recalled, "consumed a good many of my waking hours." He went on to teach poetry and fiction writing at Harvard for more than 20 years before joining the Stanford faculty in 1961.
Guerard "did a great deal for the standing of the English department," says emeritus professor Bliss Carnochan. His writings included nine novels, six works of criticism and the 1980 memoir. The New York Times Book Review in 1957 called his Conrad the Novelist "the best critical book on [Joseph] Conrad yet written," and Thomas Mann, writing a decade later, described his André Gide as "masterful." In 1998, Guerard received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Writing was not Guerard's only passion; he also loved to teach. His pedagogic flair earned him the Dean's Award in 1978 and the Walter J. Gores Award in 1983. "He thought of himself as a writer-teacher rather than a professor. He felt that his writing fed into his teaching, and vice versa," says Moser, who was both a Stanford colleague and a student of Guerard's at Harvard. Guerard launched the University's first freshman seminar program, in the late 1960s, and helped create the Voice Project, an experiment that brought professional writers to campus to teach freshmen. He co-dIrected the freshman English program from 1965 to 1967 and succeeded poet and critic Yvor Winters in 1966 as the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature--the chair named for his father. He also founded Stanford's interdisciplinary PhD program in modern thought and literature, which survives to this day.
Students recall him with fondness and a touch of awe. "I was lucky," says Alice Hoffman, MA '75, who credits him with helping her get her first short story published. "[He was] one of the greatest writing teachers in the country. He just opened the world up."
Guerard is survived by his wife of 59 years, Maclin Bocock; and three daughters, Collot, Nini, '72, and Lundie.
