Robert D. Richardson


Robert Dale Richardson III was an American historian and biographer.

Early life

Richardson was born in Milwaukee, and brought up in Medford, Massachusetts, and Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated from Exeter, in 1952, and from Harvard University, with a PhD.

Career

He taught at the University of Denver, Harvard University, Yale University, The University of Colorado, Queens College, City University of New York, Sichuan University, Wesleyan University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Richardson was known for his biographies of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. Emerson: The Mind on Fire won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1996, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism won the Bancroft Prize in 2007.

Personal life and death

Richardson was first married to Elizabeth Hall; they had two daughters.
He married Annie Dillard in 1988, after she wrote him a fan letter about Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. They had three stepdaughters.
He was program chair for New Voices at the Key West Literary Seminar.
Richardson died in Hyannis, Massachusetts on June 16, 2020, two days after his 86th birthday, from a subdural hematoma suffered in a fall.

Awards

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In the James book he even pauses, endearingly, at a tricky philosophical intersection, and allows, “This is not easy stuff.” These are intellectual biographies, which means that Richardson attempted to read everything his subjects read—which also means that he works just as hard as these death-haunted, pressed-for-time 19th-century giants who fascinate him. It's a formidable combination. He's a writer who rewards your trust, for the same reasons we learned to trust him on those sailboats far from shore—he knows what he's doing, and because he's restless, curious and fearless, he can take you where you might never travel on your own.

To trace the subtle reciprocities between philosophizing and living is the ambitious task that Robert D. Richardson sets himself in his absorbing, if also frustrating, biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.