Virginia Tufte

Virginia James Tufte (August 19, 1918 – March 28, 2020) was an author and distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her special fields were Milton, Renaissance poetry, and the history and grammar of English.

Virginia James Tufte
Born
Virginia James

August 19, 1918
Meadow Grove, Nebraska
DiedMarch 28, 2020
Beverly Hills, California
ChildrenEdward Tufte
Academic background
EducationA. B., University of Nebraska
M. A., Arizona State University
M. A. and Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles

Early life and education

Virginia James was born in Meadow Grove, Nebraska,[1] one of the ten children of Micah Dickerson James and Sarah Elizabeth Bartee James. Both of her parents were from Virginia.[2] She attended Midland College and worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and the Nebraska State Journal as a young woman.[1][3]

After marriage, Tufte pursued further education, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska in 1944,[4] a master's degree from Arizona State University, and master's and doctoral degrees in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.[5][6][7] Her 1964 dissertation was titled "Literary Backgrounds and Motifs of the Epithalamium in English to 1650".[8]

Career

Tufte was a member of the English faculty of the University of Southern California for 25 years, beginning in 1964, and retiring in 1989. At USC, she won teaching awards and was a co-founder of several interdisciplinary programs.[1] She was perhaps best known for Grammar as Style (1971), which developed a new following several decades after it had gone out of print,[9] prompting her to write its successor, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (2006).[10][11][12]

Besides her work on syntax and style, Tufte was notable for books and essays in two other areas of literary study and for a video biography. Her book The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and its Development in England (1970), a comprehensive history of the English epithalamium, grew from her doctoral research.[13] She also made studies of artists as interpreters of John Milton’s poems.[14][15] Besides numerous essays and contributions to books in this field, some in collaboration with Wendy Furman-Adams of Whittier College,[16] she wrote and produced a one-hour video biography of a literary illustrator Reaching for Paradise: The Life and Art of Carlotta Petrina (1994) that has appeared on educational television stations, is archived in college and university libraries, and is in use in classrooms.[17]

Tufte’s interest in life and family histories is reflected also in two collaborative books with anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, Changing Images of the Family (1981)[18] and Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling and Growing Older (1992).[19]

Personal life

Virginia James married Edward E. Tufte in Omaha in 1940; her husband was city engineer and public works director of the city of Beverly Hills, California, for many years.[20] Their son was Edward Rolf Tufte, an expert in the field of information design, and active as a sculptor. Virginia James Tufte was widowed when her husband died in 1999; she died in 2020, aged 101 years, at her home in Beverly Hills.[1]

Bibliography
  • Virginia James Tufte (2013). Pieces: Embroidered by Memory. Illustrated by Anna Lackaff. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
  • Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. 2006. ISBN 0-9613921-8-5.
  • Reaching for Paradise: The Life and Art of Carlotta Petrina (video biography). Los Angeles. 1994.
  • Virginia Tufte; Barbara Meyerhoff, eds. (March 1981). Changing Images of the Family. Yale Univ Press. ISBN 0-300-02671-4.
  • Grammar as Style. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1971. ISBN 0-03-079615-6.
  • Virginia Tufte; Garrett Stewart (1971). Grammar as Style: Exercises in Creativity. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 0-03-085041-X.
  • Virginia Tufte, ed. (1970). High Wedlock Then Be Honoured. Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-37159-9.
  • The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and its Development in England. University of Southern California Studies in Comparative Literature. 1970. ISBN 0-87252-012-9.
  • Virginia Tufte; Joseph Aurbach; Philip H. Cook; Robert E. Kaplan (1968). Transformational Grammar: A Guide for Teachers. Washington Educational Research Associates.

References
  1. Bell, Susan (September 11, 2020). "In Memoriam: Virginia Tufte". USC Dornsife News. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  2. "Eva Epp". The Norfolk Daily News. October 23, 2010. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  3. Tufte, Virginia (1944-06-18). "High School Musicians 'Reign' over N. U." The Nebraska State Journal. p. 23. Retrieved 2020-12-27 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. "U. N. Grants 166 Degrees As First Semester Closes". Lincoln Nebraska State Journal. January 30, 1944. p. 6. Retrieved December 27, 2020 – via NewspaperArchive.com.
  5. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Graphics Press, retrieved 2010-02-08
  6. USC Experts Directory, University of Southern California, retrieved 2010-02-08
  7. "Virginia Tufte". Nebraska Authors. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  8. Tufte, Virginia James. "Literary Backgrounds and Motifs of the Epithalamium in English to 1650" (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1964). ProQuest document ID 302117430.
  9. Moe, Peter Wayne (2018). "Virginia Tufte's Sentences". Style. 52 (4): 385–403. doi:10.5325/style.52.4.0385. ISSN 0039-4238. JSTOR 10.5325/style.52.4.0385.
  10. David Jauss (October–November 2003), "What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow", The Writer's Chronicle, 36 (2): 12–16
  11. David Jauss (2008). Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction. Writers Digest Books. pp. 68, 69. ISBN 978-1-58297-538-2.
  12. Brooks Landon (2008). Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft. The Teaching Company. pp. 22, 86, 122, 132.
  13. Heather Dubrow (1990). A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium. Cornell Univ Press. ISBN 0-8014-2296-5.
  14. Furman-James, Wendy; Tufte, Virginia James (December 2001). "Anticipating Empson: Henry Fuseli's Re-Vision of Milton's God" (PDF). Milton Quarterly. 35 (4): 258–274. doi:10.1111/1094-348X.00024.
  15. Galbraith M. Crump, ed. (1986). "Visualizing Paradise Lost: Classroom Use of Illustrations by Medina, Blake, and Doré". Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost. The Modern Language Association of America.
  16. Whittier College. "Wendy Furman-Adams". Retrieved 2010-02-10.
  17. Wendy Furman-Adams. "Reaching For Paradise: John Milton (1608-1674), Milton Illustration, and Carlotta Petrina (1901-1997)". Retrieved 2010-02-11.
  18. Changing images of the family. Tufte, Virginia., Myerhoff, Barbara G. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1979. ISBN 0-300-02361-8. OCLC 4638889.CS1 maint: others (link)
  19. Myerhoff, Barbara G.; Kaminsky, Marc (1992). Remembered lives: the work of ritual, storytelling, and growing older. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-08177-6.
  20. American Society of Civil Engineers. "Tufte, Edward E.; ASCE Fellow". Retrieved 2010-02-10.
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