Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime University of Texas professor William H. Goetzmann passed away yesterday. He was 79.
Goetzmann, a St. Paul native, attended Yale University for graduate school, where he met Tom Wolfe, who presented the Texas Book Festival’s lifetime achievement award, the Bookend Award, to Goetzmann in 2001. Goetzmann taught first at Yale and then at the University of Texas.
A specialist in the American West, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1966 for his seminal work Exploration and Empire. He later authored with son William N. Goetzmann The West of the Imagination, which became a PBS series. (Goetzmann had two other children, including Anne Goetzmann Kelley, founder of the Austin School of Film.)
Goetzmann retired from teaching in 2005, but he continued to publish – his most recent book Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism came out last year to good reviews; of it, the Chronicle’s critic wrote, “This is Cinerama scholarship, as sweeping and expansive as the nation itself … [Goetzmann] is a sure and steady guide who knows the territory as only a scholar with five decades of deep study can.”
A memorial mass will be held Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010 at 2pm at the St. Austin Catholic Parish (2026 Guadalupe St.).
This article appears in September 3 • 2010.
