A. Walton Litz
- Prizes judged
Arthur Walton Litz, Jnr was a literary critic and for some 40 years a Princeton professor of English who once wrote a study of William Faulkner entitled Yoknapatawpha.
Litz, who was born in in Nashville, Tennessee, became an academic after two years war service in the US Army and specialised in modernist writers, in particular Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He had a gift for inspiring confidence, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford was lent manuscripts by both Eliot and James Joyce and, oblivious to any potential crash, pedalled through the town with them in his bicycle basket. Litz read the modernists, he said, ‘with a sense of discovery and excitement that has never diminished’.