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WYATT PRUNTY
On May 23, 1998, just after his eighty-second birthday, Monroe Spears died of congestive heart failure, the final stage of a condition he had fought for years. As a writer himself and a discoverer of new writers, James Dickey for example, Monroe possessed abilities that over the years made him an ideal editor, critic, and teacher; and despite physical restrictions he plied his talents to the end, finishing his memoirs and a collection of poetry only a few months before he died. Heart failure seemed the wrong malady for someone who worked with that much courage.
After coediting with H. B. Wright The Literary Works of Matthew Prior (1959), Monroe Spears expanded the considerable abilities he was demonstrating on a regular basis through his editorship of the Sewanee Review by turning his attention...