Douglas Day


Douglas Turner Day III was an American novelist, biographer, scholar and critic. He was a popular professor of English literature at the University of Virginia, where he taught almost four decades.

Early life

Douglas Day was born in Colón, Panama. The son of a US Navy officer, he served as a fighter pilot in the US Marine Corps in the early 1950s. He took three degrees at the University of Virginia before joining the English faculty there in 1962.

Career

Day taught at the University of Virginia for 38 years; he was an early advocate of studying contemporary Hispanic and Latin American writers and literature. His study of the poetry of Robert Graves, his first book of literary criticism, won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for scholarly writing in 1963. Fluent in Spanish, he also edited a collection of plays by Federico Garcia Lorca.
Day documented the turbulent life of English novelist Malcolm Lowry, the alcoholic author of Under the Volcano. For that he shared the 1974 National Book Award in Biography.
Previously, he and Lowry's widow Margerie edited the novelist's posthumous novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid.
In 1973 he edited a 'restored' and definitive version of William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, which was originally published in truncated form as Sartoris.
Other books by Douglas Day include Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves and two novels: Journey of the Wolf — for which he received the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon.