Buford Jones

I first got to know Buford Jones at the Modern Language Association Convention. I remember sitting with him for hours in the lobby of the conference hotel, discussing Poe and Hawthorne and becoming increasingly delighted as our conversation turned to some of the more obscure figures who nonetheless fascinated us. When, years later, my book The Threads of The Scarlet Letter was published, I was especially pleased by his generous response. Buford was an archival scholar—an aficionado of nineteenth-century American newspapers—a maven of the microfilm reader—a collector and a connoisseur. And even as he had published vital works—I remember well such articles as “‘The Hall of Fantasy’ and the Early Hawthorne-Thoreau Relationship” (1968) and (with Kent P. Ljungquist) “The Identity of ‘Outis’: A Further Chapter in the Poe-Longfellow War” (1988)—he also had projects that never yielded publications—I remember, for instance, his work on Herman’s Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”—but these projects clearly yielded pleasure for him. His great love of discovery wholly resonated for me. Buford and I lost touch over the years, but even now I think of our long-ago conversations wistfully and gratefully. There was a sense of brief—even surprising—brotherhood. Thank you, Buford.—Richard Kopley, Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, Penn State DuBois The Hawthorne Society, as some of you likely remember, relied for many years on Buford Jones’s impeccable bibliographic skills, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of Hawthorne’s career. For me, Buford was a supportive mentor, and I shall greatly miss his penetrating wit and thoughtful kindness. We met at Duke in the early 1970s when I took his graduate class on Hawthorne and Melville. The course was electric, especially the way Buford shared the results of his own unpublished research and illuminated the ways one could use historical context, especially biography, to reveal undiscovered meanings in literary works. His article “‘The Hall of Fantasy’ and the Early Hawthorne-Thoreau Relationship” 1968) remains a model of its kind. Buford teemed with suggestions for research, and a student’s visit to his small, overflowing office at Duke invariably yielded a long list of topics ripe for study. After some fifty years, I’ve only made it through half the list he generously gave me.Larry J. Reynolds, University Distinguished Prof. of English, Emeritus, Texas A&M University