Content area
Full Text
Scott Lewis, Boundless Life: A Biography of Andrew Joseph Armstrong Waco: Armstrong Browning Library, 2014. xviii + 412 pp. + 16 ill. .$24.95.
THIS IS THE BIOGRAPHY OF A MAN WHO BUILT FIRST A collection, then a building to house it. Both collection and building are remarkable, if not unique. A. J. Armstrong, born in 1873 in Louisville, Kentucky, early showed himself to be a precocious scholar, a hero-worshipper, and an obsessive collector. The determined and relentless way in which he later gathered Browningiana was prefigured in his boyhood preoccupation with collecting autographs. He sent requests for the autographs of famous people in black-edged mourning envelopes, calculating that they would not be opened by secretaries but passed directly to the recipients. Armstrong himself remembered that "it worked like a charm" (14). Determined to become a professor, he was obliged by poverty to become a bank clerk, and it was not until 1899, at the age of twenty-six, that he enrolled at Wabash College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, where he was graduated in 1902. His teaching career began with short-term posts in small schools, until in 1904 he was appointed head of English and History at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. It was during his three years there that he first encountered Browning: a course was offered, and he had to teach it. In 1905 he started building up a "Browning library," presumably to support his teaching. In 1908 Armstrong gained a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, on "Operatic performances in England before Handel," and moved to the English department at Baylor, where he was to spend the rest of his life; he retired as chair of the department in 1952 and died two years later.
Armstrong was not only a workaholic who usually put in 14-18 hours a clay; he operated on several fronts. He brought poets, singers, and novelists from far and wide to perform to students; encouraged student drama; led educational tours of Europe, including "Browning pilgrimages"; and traveled widely, with and without his wife, to destinations that included India and Africa. But the center of his activities during his long career at Baylor...