Necrology

Edgar Mungen Glenn '40

Sep. 16, 1918-Nov. 5, 2004

Edgar Mungen Glenn ’40, a longtime professor of English at California State University, Chico, and a dedicated Ezra Pound scholar, was born on September 16, 1918, to Edgar S. and Mae Mungen Glenn, in Philadelphia, PA. He grew up in Philadelphia, was graduated from Germantown High School, and came to College Hill in 1936. Slight of build, which earned him the nickname “Tiny Mite,” Ed Glenn went out for fencing and soccer, but devoted the majority of his free time to student publications. They included Hamilton Life and the Freshman Handbook, but especially the campus magazine Royal Gaboon, of which he became editor. Secretary of the Publications Board and president of the journalism honorary Pi Delta Epsilon, he was credited with being always ready with a witty comeback and the ability to tie his verbal opponents into “intellectual knots.” A member of Sigma Phi and mentored by Professor George L. Nesbitt, “who put the zing into academe” for him, he was awarded his diploma in 1940.

By the spring of 1941, after briefly serving as a newspaper editor in Manhasset, NY, Ed Glenn went on active duty with the U.S. Navy. Commissioned as an ensign, he was assigned to the supply ship U.S.S. Castor. On December 6, 1941, the vessel docked at the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, preparatory to unloading ammunition and other supplies. The next morning, when the Japanese attacked the base, Ed Glenn found himself manning the Castor’s antiquated anti-aircraft guns. He and his ship survived the attack, and he continued to serve for the rest of the war aboard other supply ships on runs from the Aleutians to the South Pacific.

Married on September 11, 1943, to Mildred “Milly” Erskine in Mill Valley, CA, Ed Glenn left the Navy as a lieutenant commander in 1946. With graduate school made possible by the G.I. Bill and feasible by Milly, he enrolled in the doctoral program in English and American literature at Stanford University. In 1949, while still pursuing his degree, he left Stanford for his first teaching position, an instructorship at Northwestern University. He returned to California in 1953 when appointed to the faculty of Chico State College (now California State University, Chico). With a dissertation on the Cantos of his fellow Hamilton alumnus, the poet Ezra Pound, he earned his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1955.

Promoted through the academic ranks to full professor in 1963, Edgar Glenn had by that time seen through the press two guides to Pound’s Cantos and served as co-editor of Shakespeare and His Rivals: A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy (1962). His extensive study of Pound eventually led him to write an analysis of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was published as The Metamorphoses: Ovid’s Roman Games (1986).

Edgar Glenn, a former president of the Philological Association of Central California and recently active in the local chapter of the Survivors of Pearl Harbor, made several excursions over the years to Europe in furthering his Pound scholarship. He took early retirement in 1983, but continued to teach part-time at Chico State for a few more years while pursuing his research on Ovid and Pound. In the meantime, he and Milly enjoyed trips abroad, in addition to visiting their children more frequently.

Edgar M. Glenn, a devoted alumnus, died on November 5, 2004, in Chico, a week after suffering a brain injury in a fall at his home. In addition to his devoted wife of 61 years, he is survived by two daughters, Pamela and Penelope Glenn; a son, William E. Glenn; and four grandchildren.

 

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