Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, (1935), title page and table of contents

Notes:

Ruth Leigh Hudson was born October 26, 1896 in Biardstown, TX. She died May 30, 1960, Lamar County, TX. She obtained both her B.A. (1922) and M.A. (1926) from the University of Texas. (Her Master's thesis was “Hardy's Novels in Relation to Shakespeare.”) According to records at the University of Virginia, she was the head of the English Department of Paris Junior College (in Paris, TX) 1924-1927, and assistant dean there 1925-1927. (During this time, she managed to accumulate two additional years and two full summer quarters of graduate study at the University of Texas.) In 1927, she originally accepted a Pepper Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, which she resigned to instead take a teaching position at the University of Wyoming. There, she completed another year of graduate study. She held a Dupont Research Fellowship at the University of Virginia, 1934-1935. (She may have transferred to the University of Virginia as the most suitable place to provide the research materials and faculty support for her chosen dissertation topic.) In 1948, she published a book on Here is Wyoming, the University and Its State Background. In 1951, she was elected editor for the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, having served as an executive director in 1950. As late as May 1959 she was noted as teaching at the University, in a newspaper article stating that she was going to deliver an address to a local club in Billings. Thus, she appears to have still been a professor English at the University of Wyoming until near the time of her death, meaning that she taught there for most of the period 1927-1960. (Again according to University of Virginia records, she was the Assistant to the Dean of Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming, 1931-1934, suggesting that she probably took a one year sabbatical to complete her doctoral efforts in Virginia. The fact that the University of Wyoming appears to have no surviving records of her decades-long career there is a sad testimony to the failure of institutional archives, although there is still a Ruth Hudson Memorial Award for undergraduate students.) It does not appear that she ever married or had children. Once she was teaching in Wyoming, she seems to have focused on topics of more local interest. In addition to the present disseration, she wrote two articles on Poe: “Poe and Disraeli,” American Literature, January 1937, 8:402-416; and “Poe Recognizes ‘Ligeia’ as His Masterpiece,” English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson, Richmond: William Byrd Press, 1951, pp. 33-45. The last of these was presumably an acknowledgement of the fact that Wilson had been one of her advisors at the University of Virginia.

Technically, the contents of this dissertation are protected by copyright, but with Dr. Hudson herself having died in 1960, and there being no readily identifiable heir or estate, it has not been possible to secure formal permission. The University of Virginia was contacted prior to initiating this electronic edition. Although that institution was very interested in the project, it did not feel that it could assert any claims over copyright, and was therefore unable to grant formal approval. This text, then, is presented under a broad assumption of fair use, and with the idea that Dr. Hudson would have been pleased to have her work widely available for use, for educational purposes and without any charge for access. If a reasonable claim for copyright can be documented, please contact the Poe Society of Baltimore to arrange for permission, or to request that we remove the material.

Because the original disseration was prepared on a ordinary typewriter, with very little available in regard to formatting options, some liberties have been taken in this electronic presentation for the sake of improved appearance and readability. The use of underlines, for example, has been interpreted as indicating italics.