William Hugh Kenner was born in 1923 at Peterborough, Ontario, to Mary (Williams) Kenner and Henry Rowe Hocking Kenner, a school principal and instructor of Greek and Latin. He studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto where he received a BA (1945) and MA (1946, gold medal in English). He then attended Yale University where his PhD dissertation, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, received the Porter Prize in 1950.
After completing his degrees, appointments followed at Santa Barbara College (later University of California at Santa Barbara), 1950-1973; Johns Hopkins University, 1973-1990, as Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities; and the University of Georgia, where he was Franklin and Callaway Professor of English from 1990 until his retirement in 1999. Kenner has also held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan (1957), the University of Chicago (1962), the University of Virginia (1964-1965), and the Northrop Frye Chair at the University of Toronto (1985). He received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Trent University, two Guggenheim fellowships (1956, 1963), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1956).
Unlike most of his fellow academics and literary critics, Kenner knew personally, and collaborated with, many of the subjects about whom he has written. In a conversation with Ezra Pound in the early 1950s, Pound insisted, "You have an obligation to visit the great men of your own time." Kenner took this admonition literally and over the years has visited and befriended many of the major figures of literary modernism, including Samuel Beckett, William F. Buckley, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. Kenner's circle of contacts also included prominent figures outside of the modernist movement, such as Guy Davenport, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Charles Tomlinson. In addition, Kenner has written extensively, sometimes definitively, about Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, Evelyn Waugh, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats.
Considered the premier scholar and critic of literary modernism of his generation, Kenner's career spans 50 years during which he has produced 25 books (and contributed to at least 200 others), nearly a thousand periodical contributions, and numerous other publications, sound recordings, and broadcasts. He is generally acknowledged as the pre-eminent authority on Ezra Pound and one of the major voices of James Joyce scholarship. The 1951 publication of his Yale dissertation The Poetry of Ezra Pound was the first serious book on the subject to be published in America, and Dublin's Joyce (1955) and Joyce's Voices (1978) are considered classics in Joyce criticism.
Kenner's numerous articles and publications on modernist studies examine the movement in broad terms in a manner accessible to a general readership: The Pound Era (1971) outlines international modernism, A Homemade World (1975) analyzes American modernist writers, A Colder Eye (1983), the Irish modernists, and A Sinking Island (1988), the English modernists. Fellow professor, critic, and writer Guy Davenport summarized, "Kenner gave us a way to read Pound, as he has given us a way to read Joyce and Beckett. This is not to say that these are the only way to read these writers: What Kenner does best is show us how to read, and how to appreciate what we read. A critic cannot hope for more success."
The scope of Kenner's critical thought ranges across American and English intellectual history. He has written on mathematics, science, technology, and visual arts. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973) is a non-academic introduction to Fuller's theories of cosmic order and its physical properties. Kenner's book reviews for Byte magazine (1986-1993) examined computer technology for a general readership, and his Art and Antiques magazine column (1984-1992) provided cultural context for art, history, and theory. His critical works on popular culture and film include Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings for the University of California at Berkeley Portraits of American Genius series, and articles on Buster Keaton. With his expertise in the modernist movement of the early 1900s and technology and culture of the later 1900s, Kenner has created a body of work touching on many of the leading movements throughout the twentieth century.
From the guide to the Hugh Kenner Papers TXRC02-A5., 1916-1994, n.d., bulk 1943-1994, (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin)
