Joel Conarroe

Joel Conarroe, a celebrated arts administrator and professor who headed the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for nearly two decades and served as a friend and confidante to a pride of literary lions, including his close friend Philip Roth, died on Sunday April 28 2024 in the Bronx. He was 89. Joel Conarroe was president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1985 through 2002. The author of books and articles about American literature and editor of anthologies of poetry, he previously served as Chair of the English Department, University Ombudsman, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to serving, for five years, as executive director of the Modern Language Association and editor of PMLA, he has chaired the National Book Awards, and is a former president of the PEN American Center. The recipient of honorary degrees from several institutions, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in American literature in 1977 and has been a trustee of the Foundation since 1985. Conarroe was a central figure in the world of letters for decades, with stints as executive director of the Modern Language Association, the nation’s leading scholarly organization for language and literature, and the president of the P.E.N. American Center, the writers’ organization. He was a tastemaker as the chairman of the National Book Award fiction jury, the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other such posts. he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s in English from Cornell University the following year and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. He began his long academic career as an assistant professor at Penn the same year.