Guy Davenport

Many-sided author, painter, teacher and scholar whose work, while ranging from critical essays to translations to poetry, was perhaps most admired for short stories in the modernist tradition of Pound and Joyce. He taught English at the University of Kentucky for three decades. Guy Mattison Davenport Jr. was born in Anderson, S.C., on Nov. 23, 1927, the younger child of Guy Mattison Davenport, a Railway Express agent, and Marie Fant Davenport. An older sister, Gloria Williamson of Anderson, survives him, in addition to Ms. Cox. In 1944, Mr. Davenport quit high school to study art at Duke University. He eventually majored in classics and English literature, and won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1948. At Merton College, Oxford, he wrote the first thesis on Joyce to be accepted by the university, received a degree in literature in 1950, and returned to the United States. After serving from 1950 to 1952 in the Army's 18th Airborne Corps he taught at Washington University in St. Louis. A meeting with Pound in 1952 solidified his interest in modern literature and led him to take a doctorate at Harvard, where he wrote his thesis on Pound's ''Cantos,'' which helped to highlight Pound's poetic achievement in the face of his mental problems and support of fascism. After teaching at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963, he joined the University of Kentucky faculty, where he remained until he retired in 1991, after winning the MacArthur grant with its award of $365,000.