Holman, C. Hugh (Clarence Hugh), 1914-1981

In his 30 years at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Holman won fame for his studies of Southern literature, particularly involving Thomas Wolfe, the author,who was from North Carolina. In 1977 he won the O. Max Gardner Award, given each year to a member of the University of North Carolina system for contributions to the welfare of the human race. Dr. Holman played a key role in creating the National Humanities Center and then bringing it to North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. The center gives scholars the chance to spend a year researching and writing on history, literature, philosophy or any other subject in the humanities. Dr. Holman served as vice president of the center.

C. Hugh Holman (1914-1981), literary scholar specializing in Southern literature, member of the faculty of the English Department of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1949 until retirement in the 1970s, and administrator at the University of North Carolina in various capacities, 1963-1978.

Clarence Hugh Holman, son of David Marion and Jessie Pearl Davis Holman, was born in Cross Anchor, S.C., on 24 February 1914. he received his early schooling in Gaffney and Clinton, S.C., before entering Presbyterian College, from which he graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1936. From 1936 to 1939 he was director of public relations for the college, and from 1939 to 1941 director of its radio programs, receiving meanwhile an A.B. degree in English cum laude in 1939. In 1939, he studied radio programming at New York University. From 1939 to 1942 he was on the faculty of Presbyterian College, and in 1945 became its academic dean serving as state publicity director for the Council for National Defense (1942-1944) and as academic coordinator and instructor in physics for the U.S. Army Air Force (1943-1945). As an avocation during these busy years, he published a series of popular mystery novels: Death like Thunder (1942), Trout in the Milk (1946), Up This Crooked Way (1946), Another Man's Poison (1947), and, as Clarence Hunt, Small Town Corpse (1951).

But Holman was at heart an educator. In 1946, he entered the University of North Carolina as a graduate student and instructor in English, receiving his doctorate in 1949 with a dissertation on "William Gilmore Simms's Theory and Practice of Historical Fiction"; the same year he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From this time, his rise in the university was rapid. Within a decade he was appointed assistant professor (1949), associate professor (1951), professor (1956), and Kenan Professor (1959). In 1954 he served as an assistant dean and from 1955 to 1957 as acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. From 1957 to 1962 he was chairman of the Department of English, also serving as a member (1957-1973) and chairman (1961-1973) of the Board of Governors of the University Press as a chairman (1959-1962) of the Division of Humanities. From 1963 to 1966 he was dean of the graduate school, from 1966 to 1968 provost, and from 1972 to 1978 a special assistant to the chancellor, organizing and compiling a self-study survey of the university at Chapel Hill.

Holman was the recipient of a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1967), the Thomas Jefferson Award (1975), an award for excellence in writing from Winthrop College (1976), and the Oliver Max Gardner Award (1977). He was awarded a Litt.D. by Presbyterian College in 1963, and a L.H.D. for "dedicated classroom teaching" by Clemson University in 1968. In 1975 he became a member of the board of trustees of the Triangle University Center for Advanced Study, and in 1976 was named chairman of its executive committee. In the latter year he also became a member of the board of trustees, a member of the executive committee, and vice-president of the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park, and in 1980 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Holman was a deacon of the First Presbyterian Church in Clinton and an elder of the Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church in Durham.

Known beyond his university for capacities as an administrator, Holman was chairman of the American Literature Section of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (1953-1954); chairman of the bibliographical committee (1957-1961), member of the executive committee (1964-1965), program chairman (1966, 1979), and chairman (1970) of the American Literature Section, and a member of the executive committee of the Twentieth-Century American Literature Group (1978-1981) of the Modern Language Association of America; president of the Southeastern American Studies Association (1958-1959); consultant in English to the U.S. Air Force Academy (1962); and president of the Virginia-North Carolina College English Association (1962-1963). In 1957-1960, he was on the editorial board of College English; in 1967, an advisory editor of the Encyclopedia Americana; in 1968, a founding editor (with Louis D. Rubin, Jr.) of the Southern Literary Journal; and, from 1970, a member of the editorial boards of Essays on Literature and Resources for American Literary Study, and an adviser on American literature for the Encyclopedia of World Literature.

As an inquiring scholar, Holman had as his major interest prose fiction, particularly fiction of the South, a subject which he earned as international reputation for authoritative critical judgments. The author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-six books and some seventy professional articles, he is perhaps most remembered for A Handbook to Literature with W. F. Thrall and Addison Hibbard; Thomas Wolfe (1960), which has been translated into six languages; The Thomas Wolfe Reader (1962); Three Modes of Southern Fiction (1966); The Letters of Thomas Wolfe with Sue Fields Ross (1968); Southern Fiction: Renaissance and Beyond with Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Walter Sullivan (1969); Southern Writing, 1585-1920, with Richard Beale Davis and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (1970); Thomas Wolfe and the Glass of Time, with Richard S. Kennedy and Richard Walser (1971); The Roots of Southern Writing (1972); The Loneliness at the Core; Studies in Thomas Wolfe (1975), winner of the Mayflower Society Award; Southern Literary Study: Promise and Possibilities with Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (1975); The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (1977); and Windows on the World: Essays on American Social Fiction (1979).

On 1 September 1938, Holman married Verna Virginia McCleod of Ocala, Fla., and their children were Margaret McCleod Stroud (b. 1949) and David Marion (b. 1951). Holman was buried in the Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery.

[Taken from Lewis Leary's biography of Holman in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (1988), volume 3, p. 176-177