Sullivan, Walter 1924-2006
Sullivan, Walter 1924-2006
(Walter Laurence Sullivan)
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born January 4, 1924, in Nashville, TN; died of cancer, August 15, 2006, in Nashville, TN. Educator and author. A longtime professor at Vanderbilt University, Sullivan was a scholar of Southern literature who also penned several of his own novels. Born and raised in Tennessee, he earned a B.A. from Vanderbilt in 1947 after service in the U.S. Marines during World War II. He also attended the University of Iowa's writing program, where he was a student with Flannery O'Connor and earned an M.F.A. in 1949. Joining the Vanderbilt faculty that same year, Sullivan would spend his academic career at the same university. He became professor of fiction writing and of modern British and American literature in 1963, retiring in 2001. Interested in the literature of the South, he researched the Agrarian and Fugitive literary movements, and penned such scholarly texts as Death by Melancholy (1972) and A Requiem for the Renascence (1976), among others. Sullivan was also the author of three novels: Sojourn of a Stranger (1957), The Long, Long Love (1959), and A Time to Dance (1995). His last book, The War the Women Lived (1996), won the Literary Achievement Award from the Southern Heritage Society.
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2006, p. B13.