|
 Eva Redfield Rubin said by telephone that her husband, who lived
at a North Carolina retirement home, died Saturday, just three days
before his 90th birthday.
A Charleston, S.C., native who switched from journalism to academia
in the 1950s, Rubin for decades mentored and published Southern
writers. He was among the first to write a scholarly analysis on the
posthumous reputation of Thomas Wolfe, taught such future stars as
Barth, Dillard and Kaye Gibbons and, through Algonquin Books of
Chapel Hill, published fiction by Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Lee
Smith and many more.
Rubin himself was a prolific author who wrote novels, critical
studies, histories, memoirs and even a guide for predicting the
weather. He started or co-started such influential publications as
The Hollins Critic and the Southern Literary Journal. Algonquin
Books, co-founded in 1982 by Rubin and Shannon Ravenel, has been an
invaluable resource for writers overlooked by New York editors.
In 2005, the National Book Critics Circle presented Rubin with a
lifetime achievement award.
He was as much a presence in person as on the page, a case study for
the word "rumpled," an impulsive yeller and selective smiler who
wore hearing aids that friends swore broke down when conversation
turned tiresome. Dillard, Ravenel and others would acknowledge being
frightened by him at first, then coming around.
"He's tireless, loyal, gruff and a genius, really," Ravenel once
said of Rubin, who left Algonquin in 1992. (The publisher was bought
out in 1989 by the New York-based Workman Press).
Born in 1923, Louis Decimus Rubin was a descendant of Russian Jews
who by age 10 had already written a play and owned a typewriter soon
after. Early heroes included Ernest Hemingway and H.L. Mencken. He
graduated with a degree in history from the University of Richmond,
and worked for The Associated Press and such newspapers as the
Richmond News-Leader before returning to school as a graduate
student at Johns Hopkins University.
He quickly emerged as a keeper of the past and present. His study of
Wolfe, "Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth," was an early
treatise on the late novelist known for "You Can't Go Home Again"
and "Look Homeward, Angel." A review of authors from Edgar Allan Poe
to Eudora Welty that Rubin co-edited with Robert D. Jacobs,
"Southern Renascence," is credited as a starting point in modern
Southern literary criticism.
As a teacher at Hollins College, then at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rubin had a gift for attracting such
established authors as Howard Nemerov and William Golding as
instructors and for spotting talent among his students. In recent
years, he would be criticized for (benign) paternalism, especially
at Hollins, where the undergraduates all were women. Rubin would
define his approach to creative writing as "teaching people how to
read."
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"If this be elitism, make the most of it," he wrote in the essay
"What Are All Those Writers Doing on Campus?"
Ravenel was one self-described "Rubin groupie," an undergraduate at
Hollins at the time Rubin joined the faculty. He not only convinced
Ravenel to edit the school's literary magazine, but remained in
touch after she graduated, helping her find work as an editor with
Houghton Mifflin and sending her manuscripts of promising writers.
In a 2002 essay published in Southern Review, Ravenel remembered
receiving a letter from Rubin in the early '80s that declared the
imminent death of literary fiction from New York City and called for
a new publisher, based in the South and run by Rubin, with Ravenel's
help.
"I don't mean regional or experimental avant-garde stuff, but simply
the best fiction (and nonfiction) I can locate," wrote Rubin, who
named the company Algonquin, not after the New York hotel, but after
a passenger ship he remembered from childhood.
Algonquin was very much homegrown: The company started in his study,
expanded to his living room, then a bedroom, a porch and to his
woodshed in the backyard. The initial editors all were former Rubin
students. They worked together and truly played together, forming
the Algonquin Bluegrass Band, which featured Rubin on harmonica.
Rubin's passions also included baseball, boats, trains and his
Jewish roots, all duly documented in his own books, including "Small
Craft Advisory," ''Babe Ruth's Ghost" and "A Memory Trains." The
memoir "An Honorable Estate," published in 2001, covered his years
in journalism. "My Father's People," which came out in 2002, was a
dry-eyed reflection on his immigrant ancestors.
"Nostalgia is an impoverishing emotion; it robs our memory of all
its complexity. I hope I have avoided it," Rubin wrote in the
prologue. "There were no Good Old Days; my father's generation knew
that very well. Yet we are our memory, and we exist in Time. What we
can know is the distance we have traveled, and where we have been."
The Rubins were married in 1951. They had two children.
The News & Observer said Rubin died at Galloway Ridge at Fearrington,
a retirement community in North Carolina's Chatham County.
[Associated
Press; HILLEL ITALIE]
Associated Press writer
Pam Sampson in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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