Julian Lane Moynahan (March 21, 1925 – March 21, 2014) was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.
Early life
Moynahan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, in 1925;[1] at the time of the 1940 census, Moynahan was living in Walden Street with his mother, Mary, his eighteen-year-old sister, Anne, and sixteen-year-old brother, Joseph.[2]
Moynahan was both an undergraduate and a graduate at Harvard, where he took the degrees of AB (1946), AM (1951) and PhD (1957).[3] While there, he met Elizabeth Reilly, a student at Radcliffe who became an architect, and they had three daughters.[4] Moynahan's early work was as a librarian in the Boston Public Library.[5]
Career
In 1954, Moynahan was an instructor in English at Amherst College.[6] In 1959, he was appointed for three years to a Bicentennial Preceptorship at Princeton University.[7] He went on to become a lecturer at Princeton, Harvard, and University College Dublin, and by 1969 was professor of English literature at Rutgers University.[5][1] In 1975 he was reported to be both professor and librarian.[8]
In 1966, Moynahan was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.[9] In 1969, a reviewer of his second novel wrote that despite being "disguised as an English professor at Rutgers", he was really "a nonstop Irish-American storyteller", gadding from one character to another, with a fondness for black comedy.[5]
Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. His views on Lawrence were mixed, and he found The Plumed Serpent to be "the most padded and redundant" of his works.[12] In 1975, Joseph Frank invited Moynahan to give three lectures at Princeton on Anglo-Irish writers, and from this a third specialism developed. He struck up friendships with Seán Ó Faoláin and Benedict Kiely.[13] Two weeks after Nabokov's funeral at Montreux, an American memorial event was held at the McGraw Hill auditorium in New York, and some 500 people heard Alfred Appel, Alfred Kazin, John Updike, Dmitri Nabokov, Moynahan, and Harold McGraw pay tribute.[14]
By 2005, Moynahan had retired and was a professor emeritus at Rutgers.[19] After he died of pneumonia in March 2014, on his 89th birthday,[1] an obituary by Stuart Mitchner in Town Topics called him witty, dashing, roguish, and breezy, "refreshingly counter to the remote, buttoned-up academic".[4]
Moynahan and his wife were married for 68 years.[4] She survived him until September 2019.[20]
^Report of the President, Dean, Librarian, College Physician, and Treasurer (Amherst College, 1954), p. 3: "Julian LANE MOYNAHAN, Instructor in English"
^The President's Report (Princeton University, 1959), p. 34
^Julian L. Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
^Mary Helen Thuente, 'Julian Moynahan "Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture" (Book Review)', in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 40, 2, (January 1997), 235-238
^ Christina Chance, Matthieu Boyd, Aled Llion Jones, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium (Harvard UP, 2010), p. 356, citing Moynahan, Anglo-Irish, p. 183
^Harold Bloom, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (Infobase Publishing, 2005), p. 111