Adair, Mary Virginia Hamilton

Mary Virginia Hamilton, poet and teacher, was born on February 28, 1913, in New York City. Her father was Robert Browning Hamilton, attorney for American Surety Co., and her mother was Katharine Temple Hopson. Adair, who went by the name Virginia, graduated from the Kimberly School, in Montclair, New Jersey in 1929. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Mount Holyoke College with an English major and Art minor from Mount in 1933. At Mount Holyoke she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Sarah Wiliston Scholar, a winner of the Jessie Goodwin Spalding Latin Prize, and, twice, the Glasock Award for Poetry. She earned a Master of Arts in English from Radcliffe in 1934. On June 26, 1937, she married Douglass Graybill Adair, Jr., an historian. Together, they had three children, Robert, born in 1939, Douglass III, born in 1942, and Katharine "Kappa," born in 1944. Her husband unexpectedly committed suicide in 1968. Virginia taught English, first at the University of Wisconsin, Madison for a year, and then at the California State Polytechnic College in Pomona from 1957 to 1980. She published a few poems in magazines during the 1930s and 40s, and though she always wrote, did not publish again until 1996, when she was 82 and had been blind for several years. Her first book of poetry was Ants on the Melon, followed by Beliefs and Blasphemies in 1998, and Living on Fire in 2000, all published by Random House. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Mount Holyoke College in 1999. In 2004 Virginia Adair died at a retirement community in Claremont, California, at the age of 91.