remembrance
begin page 64 | ↑ back to top1913-2000
Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, Rodney M. Baine (1913-2000) graduated from Tupelo High School in 1931, then earned degrees from Southwestern at Memphis, from Vanderbilt, and from Harvard. In 1936 he held a Rhodes Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford. Baine served as an instructor of English at MIT, and as professor at the University of Richmond, Delta State University of Alabama at Montevallo, and finally, beginning in 1962, the University of Georgia. He published books on Defoe (Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural, 1968), Holcroft (Thomas Holcroft and the Revolutionary Novel, 1965), Munford (Robert Munford: America’s First Comic Dramatist, 1962), and through the 1990s he edited several volumes of papers concerning James Oglethorpe and the founding of Georgia. His 1986 privately printed and privately distributed book, The Scattered Portions: William Blake’s Biological Symbolism, has become a respected reference. Baine was an avid chess player and a member of the local symphony. The lecture series endowed by his elder sons in his honor was inaugurated in the mid-1980s by Northrop Frye, a fellow student at Oxford with whom Baine became well acquainted. [Nelson Hilton, as adapted from the Athens [Ga.] Daily News/Banner-Herald, 27 June 2000, at www.onlineathens.com.]