826 words
Morse Peckham (1914-1993) was a literary critic and cultural historian who was very well-known during his lifetime but who has been largely forgotten today. He had all the qualities that make him anathema in today’s academia: Besides being white, brilliant, and a writer of enormous clarity and precision, Peckham was also a careful and insightful editor of nineteenth-century literary texts, a Darwinist, and a prescient observer of the decline of the American university.