Samuel Pickering

Last updated
Samuel and Victoria Pickering in 2003 Samuel Pickering and his wife Victoria.jpg
Samuel and Victoria Pickering in 2003

Samuel F. "Sam" Pickering Jr. (born September 30, 1941) is a writer and professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. [1] His unconventional teaching style was an inspiration for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society . [2] Pickering specializes in the familiar essay, children's literature, nature writers, and 18th and 19th century English literature. [3] Pickering has published many collections of non-fiction personal essays as well as over 200 articles.

Contents

Life

Samuel Pickering was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended Montgomery Bell Academy. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.) from the University of the South and a second B.A. from St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He briefly returned to his alma mater, Montgomery Bell, to teach, a year before attending graduate school, receiving a Master of Arts degree (M.A.) at St Catharine's. He attained a second M.A. and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) from Princeton University. In addition, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Oglethorpe University in 2002. [4] [5]

Career

One of Pickering's students at Montgomery Bell Academy, Tom Schulman, later wrote the script for the film Dead Poets Society , basing the pedagogy of Robin Williams' character very loosely on Pickering's eccentric style. Pickering has eschewed publicity raised by the film and has since regarded the unorthodoxy of his classroom behavior as more goalless than that depicted in Dead Poets Society, in which unorthodoxy is employed deliberately as a way to preach the values of non-conformity and carpe diem . Instead, Pickering has commented that "I did such things not so much to awaken students as to entertain myself." [6] Pickering has often considered his teaching style purely purposeless and impulsive, and he criticizes those who have subsequently asked him about his philosophy on education, responding that people, regarding such large social questions, have trouble with "the realization that mostly it's all meaningless. I don't know why people want answers." [6]

Pickering's writing has been characterized as equally sporadic, meandering, and amusing, with a common teaching and writing guideline of "You have to lie to give the illusion of the truth." [7] His non-fiction work typically takes a humorous tone and revolves around the everyday absurdities and pretensions of civilization. [1] Regarding his writing process, Pickering has said:

I tie all kinds of things together because I like to drift. That's the way life is. Some folks don't like that. [...Visiting writer Scott Sanders] talked about all the tools he could use in the books. So, I wrote an essay called "Tool Less" because I can't use any tools. [laughs] So I wrote about that and I proved that the people who couldn't use tools were more flexible. They were very nice people. People who used tools thought that things could be made and fashioned to last. People who didn't use tools knew that nothing lasts so they were not zealots of any kind. He thought I was a complete savage and a fascist at that. [laughs] [3]

Pickering was an assistant professor at Dartmouth College from 1970–1978, associate professor at the University of Connecticut from 1978-1984, and has been a professor at the University of Connecticut since 1984. A Fulbright recipient, Pickering has lectured in classrooms in Jordan and Syria, and has held research posts at the University of Western Australia as well as the University of Edinburgh. Since the end of 2013, Pickering has been titled "professor emeritus" on the University of Connecticut's website. [8]

Bibliography

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sidney Lanier</span> American musician and poet

Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned, taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. Many schools, other structures and two lakes are named for him, and he became hailed in the South as the "poet of the Confederacy". A 1972 US postage stamp honored him as an "American poet".

Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and band leader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.

The 1922 Georgia Bulldogs football team represented the Georgia Bulldogs of the University of Georgia during the 1922 college football season. The team had a 5–4–1 record and was the first Georgia team to compete in the newly formed Southern Conference, which was formed when a group of teams left the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA) after the end of the 1921 season. This was Georgia's third and final season under the guidance of head coach Herman Stegeman, though he remained athletic director.

Robert Hugh Ferrell was an American historian and a prolific author or editor of more than 60 books on a wide range of topics, including the U.S. presidency, World War I, and U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. One of the country's leading historians, Ferrell was widely considered the preeminent authority on the administration of Harry S. Truman, and also wrote books about half a dozen other 20th-century presidents. He was thought by many in the field to be the "dean of American diplomatic historians", a title he disavowed.

Thomas C. Hubka is an American architectural historian whose primary focus is vernacular architecture and related issues of architecture and cultural meaning.

Kenneth George Wilson was an author, professor of English and vice president at the University of Connecticut. His best-known work is The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, published in 1993.

David Laird Dungan was an American scholar of Christianity. He served as Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also was a scholar of the synoptic problem.

François André Camoin, was a French-American academic and short story writer.

Michael O'Brien was an English historian, specialising in the intellectual history of the American South. He was Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge from 2005 to 2015.

John Garry Clifford was an American historian and professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.

Steve Orlen was an American poet and professor at the University of Arizona. He was visiting professor at the University of Houston, Goddard College, and Warren Wilson College. Orlen was a co-founder of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona and a 1967 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catharine Savage Brosman</span> American writer

Catharine Savage Brosman is an American poet, essayist, and scholar of French literature and a former professor at Tulane University, where she held the Gore Chair of French Studies.

James Ashbrook Perkins is Professor Emeritus of English and Public Relations at Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where he became a faculty member in 1973 and was department chair from 2000 to 2005.

The following bibliography of the American Civil War comprises over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month. There is no complete bibliography to the war; the largest guide to books is over 40 years old and lists over 6,000 titles selected by leading scholars. The largest guides to the historiography annotates over a thousand titles.

The 1922 Mercer Baptists football team was an American football team that represented Mercer University as a member of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA) during the 1922 college football season. In their third season under head coach Josh Cody, Mercer compiled a 5–6 record.

Bobby Lovett is an American historian. He is an emeritus professor of history at Tennessee State University, where he served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2009. He is the author of several books about African-American history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Ragusea</span> American culinary YouTuber

Adam Ragusea is an American YouTuber who creates videos about food recipes, food science, and culinary culture. Until 2020, Ragusea was a professor of journalism at Mercer University.

Oglethorpe Park was a municipal park in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The park, consisting of about 50 acres (20 ha), was created in 1869 and hosted numerous fairs, most notably the International Cotton Exposition in 1881. Following this exposition, the park was sold by the city and was converted into the Exposition Cotton Mills, utilizing facilities that had been built for the event. The closure of the park indirectly contributed to the creation of two later parks in Atlanta: Grant Park and Piedmont Park.

John Herbert Roper Sr. is an American historian. The University of North Carolina has a collection of his papers.

References

  1. 1 2 Franz, Janie. "A Visit with Pickering". Critique Magazine. Retrieved December 19, 2007.
  2. Henderson, Bill (January 12, 1992). "Robin Williams and Then Some". The New York Times. Retrieved December 19, 2007.
  3. 1 2 Franz, Janie. "On Writing". Critique Magazine. Archived from the original on December 16, 2007. Retrieved December 19, 2007.
  4. "Honorary Degrees Awarded by Oglethorpe University". Oglethorpe University. Archived from the original on 2015-03-19.
  5. "Pickering to Deliver Commencement Address at Oglethorpe University" (PDF) (Press release). Atlanta, Georgia: Oglethoripe University. April 15, 2002. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 17, 2012. Retrieved 2015-03-04. Pickering will deliver the commencement address, "This Great Gift," and will be presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.
  6. 1 2 Spinner, Jenny (2003). "Interview with Sam Pickering". Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Project MUSE. 5 (1): 192–207. doi:10.1353/fge.2003.0026. S2CID   109037679 . Retrieved 2012-09-17.
  7. "Real-life professor inspires 'Dead Poets' character". TimesDaily . Florence, AL, USA: Tennessee Valley Printing Co., Inc. Associated Press. July 10, 1989. Retrieved January 18, 2015.
  8. "Sam Pickering (departmental profile)". Department of English--People--Emeriti. University of Connecticut. 30 October 2019.