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Light a Candle
John Oliver Perry was born in France where his father worked for the YMCA and, later, as a construction engineer for the Crane Company. In 1930, the family moved to Asheville, NC, and subsequently to Pennsylvania and Ohio where John received his early education.
School years
In 1946 John enrolled in Kenyon College, graduating three years later magna cum laude, with highest honors in English, and member of Phi Beta Kappa. In the late 1940's, Kenyon College became a leading center for New Criticism, and John studied with such well-known critics and poets as John Crowe Ransom, William Empson, Yvor Winters, Herbert Read, and Mark Schorer. Years later, John's teachers at Kenyon remembered him as the most brilliant among the brilliant students who were drawn to study literature at Kenyon in those years.
After getting his M.A. at the University of Florida, John went to the University of California, Berkeley to continue his graduate studies. He received his Ph.D. in 1958; his dissertation, directed by Mark Schorer, was on '"The Dickens Melodrama: Structure and Morality in Dickens' Novels." While at Berkeley, John married Lucy Holt, and John's first child, Gavin was born. His second child, Celia was born in Colorado where John taught as an instructor at the University of Colorado. Both children later attended Tufts.
Professional career
In 1958, John got his first full-time job at Harpur College. Of special importance to John was his participation in the broad humanities program when he began another of his lifelong endeavors: the weaving together of his literary studies and his social and political concerns. At Harpur, John worked with CORE and CNA V, a group opposed to nuclear testing. John went to Tufts University in Medford MA, in 1964. In 1966 he was promoted to Associate Professor and named to the Goldthwaite Chair of Rhetoric. He spent 1968-9 academic year as Director of the Tufts in London program in England. The 1971-2 year was spent in India on a Fulbright Fellowship.
In 1981 he became a Full Professor. Over the years he served the English Department in many roles: as Acting Chair, and Director of Freshman English. The latter position has been especially important, for it was under John's leadership that the Freshman English Program was radically revised. He wanted, as he wrote, to help students "break loose from the binding prejudices, the dogged acceptance, and the passive discipline they had previously been taught in corporate America...Why not let instructors of Freshman English ... design their own courses, as long as the practice of critical reading, writing, and thinking continued--and then let the students choose from a wide array of courses so that both they and their teacher would have some 'passionately reflected-on experience'... to discuss, write about, and incorporate into their sensibilities, their growing selves?"
This desire to change the Freshman Writing Program grew out of John's involvement in political activities inside and outside Tufts in the late 1960's and early 1970's. He was a member of the New University Conference, participated in the strikes against Nixon's illegal invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War in general. He worked to get ROTC off the Tufts Campus, and for the faculty resolution against the Vietnam War.
Political action
In 1950, John began his lifelong commitment to social and political change, working for Helen Douglas in her famous fight against Richard Nixon. Outside of Tufts, he continued his antiwar protest and was an early supporter of Eugene McCarthy's candidacy for President of the U.S. In his own words, these were "learning years," and he translated his own experiences into the new Freshman Writing Seminars, which integrated social and political concerns with literary studies. Throughout, he insisted that every freshman should have an opportunity to take a seminar that would make him/her a more accomplished scholar and a more discerning citizen. Indeed, his work in the Freshman Writing Program anticipated the contextualizing of literary studies. This deep commitment to the renewal of the undergraduate experience is also evident in the feminist course on The New Woman (later co-taught with Linda Barber) which he began as early as 1969, and in his participation in the Integrated Studies Program, the College Within, and the Experimental College.
The translation of his political beliefs and social concerns into his scholarly work is clear in his publications. His first book, Approaches to the Poem (1964) uses a New Critical approach, but in Backgrounds to Modern Literature (1968), and The Experience of Poems (1972), John drew on philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and reader-response theory to establish a multi-disciplinary context of interpretation.
In response to the violence, illegality, and injustice he had seen the United States inflict at home and abroad, John began to look to other cultures for spiritual sources of justice and non-violence. He also wanted, as he put it, 'to see how the rest of mankind has lived in most of human time." In 1971-72 he was Fulbright lecturer at New Delhi University, India, the land of Gandhi. (His son Gavin joined him that fall '71 semester before returning to go to Tufts as a freshman in 1972. Subsequent returns to India in 1978-79 (as a Whiting Fellow); with his second wife, Sue, in 1981 on a Ford Foundation Grant, and in 1986-87 as a Fulbright Research Fellow proved extraordinarily fruitful for John's personal life and career. He has lectured widely in India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. Most important, he became the originator and coordinator of studies in the protest poetry written in response to the Emergency Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975-77. Since 1978, John had written many essays in Western and Asian journals on the protest poetry, and in 1983 he published Voices of Emergency. An All Indian Anthology of Protest Poetry, of the 1975-77 Emergency. His next book "Absent Authority" was a study of critical approach appropriate for Indian-English poetry.
While he looked abroad in his research, he continued his political work at home. In the English Department and the University he served as an example of the fullest adherence to affirmative action. He insisted that the YUniversity fulfill not only the law but the spirit of equality. As President, member of committees, and editor of the newsletter he labored tirelessly for the benefit of the Tufts American Assoc. of University Professors. His years with the AAUP provided a line of stability and continuity which proved valuable for the AAUP in its ongoing struggles.
Retirement years in Seattle
John and Sue retired and moved to Seattle in 1989 where they had children and grandchildren (and now great-grand children). He continued to search for justice and equality and to translate his discoveries into action, scholarship, and poetry for the rest of his life. John leaves behind him many legacies, among them, we hope, a new position in World and non-Western literature which will benefit future generations of students. And he leaves with us a passionate reminder that the struggle for freedom, inside and outside of academia, is never-ending.
Starting in 2012 John spent many hours composing haiku, which he called "textes" here are a few examples:
Hey folks! Please don't say
"He passed away ..." When I'm dead,
Just say that I died.
May my memorial
Be not at some time and place,
But in idle thoughts.
Many more can be found on his Google drive which is linked here: http://bit.ly/2gfUqFM
Family
John is survived by his brother Stewart and sister-in-law Vicki, first wife Lucy and their children Gavin (Lynne; grand children Robin, Alex, Drew and Ben; great-grand children Rylee, Isabel, Violet, Nora and Zach) and Celia (Bob Pool; children Sean, Erica, and Katy Rose) as well as Sue, his devoted wife of 42 years, with him until the end, and her children Amy Hagopian (who, with Steve Ludwig, raised three grand children Jesse Hagopian (great grand children Miles and Satchel), Kolia Ludwig, Anna Ludwig) and Geoffrey Hagopian (wife Gabrielle Jackson, and two grandchildren, Genevieve and Garrett).
John was appalled at the impending presidency of Donald Trump, whose election no doubt contributed to his sudden decline in health.
