Carol Gelderman, an esteemed English professor at the ÍćĹĽ˝ă˝ă for more than three decades and the author of 10 books—including a biography of Henry Ford—died on March 8. She was 89.
After earning a doctorate from Northwestern University, Gelderman joined the University in 1972 and remained on the English faculty until her retirement in 2005. She was such a prolific and skilled writer that in 1993 she was named a Distinguished Professor, a prestigious title held by only five faculty members at any one time.
Her 10 published books included two textbooks about business and professional writing. A passionate student of American politics, she analyzed presidential speech writing in “All the President’s Words: The Bully Pulpit and the Creation of the Virtual Presidency.” But Gelderman was best known for her biographies. A review of “Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist” made the cover of Business Week. Her biography of the writer Mary McCarthy, “Mary McCarthy: A Life,” was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
She continued to write throughout her life. “A Free Man of Color and His Hotel: Race, Reconstruction, and the Role of the Federal Government,” was published in 2012 when she was 77. In it, she examined the life of James Wormley, a free Black man who owned and operated the most luxurious hotel in Washington, D.C., from the 1850s until the 1880s.
In his eulogy of Gelderman, former ÍćĹĽ˝ă˝ă provost, English professor and founder of the Creative Writing Workshop Rick Barton called her a “scholar and acclaimed writer, a cherished teacher, a caring colleague and a loyal friend.”
“Despite all the long hours of intellectual effort it took to research and write these amazingly dissimilar 10 books, Carol shined in other aspects of her life as well,” Barton said. “We all know university faculty who publish important books and articles but don’t bother to put the same effort into their teaching duties. Not Carol Gelderman. She was as devoted a teacher as she was a scholar.”
Before receiving master’s and doctoral degrees from Northwestern, Gelderman worked for the American Embassy in London for a year and in public television in Chicago, conducting on-air interviews of visiting VIPs for a show called “Profile Chicago.” In addition to her 10 books, she wrote dozens of articles on topics as varied as theatre, biography, politics and mutual funds.
“Carol Gelderman was a vivacious, gregarious and affable person. She had friends all over New Orleans,” Barton said. “Carol was beloved by so many of us because she never practiced self-aggrandizement. She was a literary star, but you’d never learn about that from her.”
Colleagues and friends are planning to hold a memorial for Gelderman on ÍćĹĽ˝ă˝ă’s campus. Those details are incomplete.
