Merton M. Sealts, Jr.

Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (December 8, 1915 - June 4, 2000) was a scholar of American literature, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville. His most important works are the genetic edition of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (1962, co-edited with Harrison Hayford), Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (1982) and Melville's Reading (1966, revised edition 1988). He taught at Lawrence College (1948-1965), and became Henry A. Pochmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1965-1982). He won both Ford Foundation and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Sealts was born on 8 December 1915, in Lima, Ohio, as an only child to Merton Sealts (1876-1946) and Daisy Hathaway Sealts (1879-1974). His father worked as a salesman for the family business of wholesale grocers. Initially the family lived on 540 West Market Street, but when Sealts was nine years old they moved to a house under construction at 1440 West Market Street, in a new addition called Westwood. Sealts's schooling began in 1921 at Franklin elementary in Lima. In 1929 he enrolled at Lima Central High School, where his principal interest during all four years was in journalism. In 1933 he enrolled at the College of Wooster as a member of the Class of 1937, the first member of either side of his family to attend college. At Wooster he took courses in philosophy with Vergilius Ferm, where Plato became one of his favorites. In his senior year, he took courses on Shakespeare with Howard Lowry, and on Milton with Lowell W. Coolidge. Lowry advised him to study English at Yale, where he enrolled in 1937. In his third year, he took a seminar with Stanley T. Williams, who was among the first scholars to teach American literature, a field which had not been formed. Sealts wrote one paper on "the intellectual affiliations of Emerson's Nature and another, out of which his dissertation grew, on Melville's major philosophical ideas." Sealts described Williams's seminar in American literature as "the most valuable course I took at Yale and the most influential as well." Williams supervised more than a dozen dissertations on Melville, among them Sealts's on "Herman Melville's Reading in Ancient Philosophy." His classmates included many of the scholars who would lay down many of the fundaments for Melville studies.

...
Wikipedia