One of my colleagues who took Jerry Mills' course in Spenser was awed by the amount of carefully-detailed information he disclosed in that class. Being obsessive herself, she recorded everything he said, and to my delight gave the document to me.
Jerry was equally gifted as an editor, as I learned when he selected one of my essays for SP -- and then as I learned again when he rejected a mediocre piece. His apology for the rejection is part of what I liked best about him, his warm friendship during the summers I worked at Chapel Hill. A great scholar and storyteller, great person.
Robin Reid
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anne Prescott [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 6:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Jerry Leath Mills
This is indeed sad news, Tom. A wonderful man. I'll just add that my daughter, with whom I'm staying at the moment, got her MA at Chapel Hill, after a BA in classics, and was a bit nervous about the switch. "Motor-mouth Mills," as Prof. Mills called himself to the class, was supportive and warm, engaging and engaged, funny and informative, and aside from his rapid-fire lectures ("I had so much to get in," he told me this spring, grinning, when I reminded him of his nickname) used his grad students to fact-check submissions to SP to save the journal a bit of effort but also to teach the students about human error. She was shocked when I just told her about this and joins her condolences to mine. Anne.
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Herron, Thomas <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Dear List,
It is with great sadness that I write of Jerry Leath Mills’ death last night, of an apparent heart attack.
I do not have the wherewithal to write a proper obituary here. Jake spent his career at Chapel Hill before retiring and coming out east to ECU, where he was a treasured colleague. He was editor for many years of Studies in Philology and an early corresponding editor of SpN. He was an acknowledged authority on Sir Walter Raleigh’s literary works, including an entry on Raleigh for DLB, and his work on Spenser’s House of Temperance is cited in Hamilton’s FQ edition.
A native of rural North Carolina, he was an avid sportsman and immensely knowledgeable about Southern literature, including Thomas Wolfe. He wrote a very witty and influential essay, “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century” for Southern Literary Journal 29.1 (Fall 1996). A bar, “The Dead Mule”, was named after it in Chapel Hill and is still in operation, as is an on-line literary journal, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (http://www.deadmule.com/). He was much loved by his students and colleagues.
Sincerely, Thomas Herron
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