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.
In the first half of his career, he published as Robert D. Richardson Jr. Later, he dropped the "Jr."

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.
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

Works

This section lists only Richardson's book-length publications. For his dozens of essays, forwards, and reviews, see the author's official website.
Biographical booksHenry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. University of California Press. 1986.'. University of California Press. 1996.William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2006.
Scholarly monographsLiterature and Film. Indiana University Press. 1969.Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance. Indiana University Press. 1978.
Edited and introduced collections