Gray, James, 1899-1984

James Gray, B.A. (1920) University of Minnesota. Professor of English at the University of Minnesota and author of the University of Minnesota' centennial history.

James Gray was born in Minneapolis in 1899. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism in 1920 and was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Literature, by Hamline University in 1939.

Gray joined the staff of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch in 1920. He resigned in 1946 to accept the position of literary editor with the Chicago Daily News . While in Chicago he also taught creative writing and English at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he returned to the University of Minnesota as a professor of English and was commissioned to write a history of the university as part of its centennial celebrations, The University of Minnesota, 1851-1951 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [1951]). Gray took a two-year leave of absence from the university starting in 1951 in order to research and write, Business without Boundary (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [1954]), a history of General Mills. He left the university in 1954.

James Gray also wrote a history of the school of nursing, Education for Nursing (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [1960]) as well as Open Wide the Door (New York, Putnam [1958]) which is a condensed history of the University of Minnesota published as part of a series on great American universities. Some of Gray’s other publications include a collection of critical essays, On Second Thought (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [1946]), and Pine, Steam, and Prairie: Wisconsin and Minnesota in Profile (New York, Knopf, [1945]).

In 1964 the University of Minnesota awarded James Gray the Outstanding Achievement Award. James Gray died in Stamford, Connecticut on August 6, 1984 at the age of 85.