David Minter Academic Papers

David L. Minter, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Emeritus of English at Rice University and one of the foremost scholars of 20th century American literature, was born in west Texas on March 20, 1935 to a Methodist minister father and a former schoolteacher mother. Orphaned in October 1948, he lived with older siblings, and as a young man worked as a cowhand on a ranch and later as a roughneck in the oil fields. Minter began his college work at the University of Houston in 1955, then transferred to the University of North Texas, where he majored in literature and philosophy. There he became friends with Larry McMurtry, and met Caroline Sewell, who became his wife. The Minters have two children, Christopher Sewell Minter and Frances Elizabeth Minter.

After graduation he took a master’s degree at UNT. In 1958 Minter and his wife moved to New Haven, where Minter studied Christianity and Culture at the Yale Divinity School. There he won a W.R. Coe Fellowship to pursue a doctorate in American Studies at Yale. After graduating in 1965, he served as a lecturer at Hamburg University in Germany for a year on a Fulbright Travel Fellowship, returning afterward to Yale to work as a lecturer in English and American Studies for a year. (Minter has also been a visiting professor at Columbia in New York and Washington University in St. Louis). In 1967 he returned to Houston to begin a career as an Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. Minter received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1969 and the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 1974, 1976, and 1977. He also chaired the English Department at Rice from 1978-1980. Dr. Minter and his wife served as co-masters of Baker College from 1973-1979.

In 1981 Dr. Minter took the position of Asa G. Candler Professor of American Literature at Emory University, where he remained until 1990. In 1990 he returned to Rice as the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English. At Rice he served as the University Librarian and Interim Vice-Provost from 1995-1996; in 1999 he served as Vice-Provost for the University. He was also named the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English in 1999, a chair endowed by one of his former students. In 2002 he retired from teaching at Rice. His books include William Faulkner: His Life and Work and A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner.