University of Virginia Library

JOHN CALVIN METCALF

The Metcalf Residence House commemorates
the name of John Calvin Metcalf,
Linden Kent Professor of English Literature
from 1917 to 1940 and Dean of the
Department of Graduate Studies from 1923
to 1937—a scholar-administrator who quietly
deepened the prestige of an expanding
University. He was born in Christian
County, Kentucky, 7 August 1865. His
father, a native of Maine, was a prominent
physician in southern Kentucky, and his
mother was related to several distinguished
Virginia families. The son matriculated at
Georgetown College in Kentucky, winning
his M.A. in 1888. He pursued graduate
study at the University of Chicago and at
Harvard University, gaining his second
M.A. from the latter in 1905. Meantime he
had begun his teaching career, as Professor
of Latin at Soule College in Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, as Professor of Modern Languages
at Mercer University in Georgia,
and as Professor of English at his alma

mater, Georgetown College, the last post
being held from 1895 to 1904. He came to
Virginia in 1904, where, at the University
of Richmond, he was Professor of English
from 1904 to 1917 and Dean from 1914 to
1917. Thereafter he was at the University
of Virginia, gaining well deserved renown
as a teacher, as an administrator, as a lecturer,
and as an editor and an author.

He was a man of gentle manners and a
distinguished bearing, and he won a host
of friends among his students and his associates.
As a teacher and public lecturer
he blended clarity and wit with convincing
scholarship. Though he retired from teaching
in 1940, he was in the session of 19421943
summoned back to give courses during
the absence of many Professors in war
service. Under his administration the Graduate
School came of age in gaining recognition
among the Universities of this country.
As Chairman of the Faculty Library
Committee for twenty-one years (during
which he presided over every one of its
meetings) he saw the Library expand into

a collection and service of distinction.
Meantime his facile pen produced numerous
textbooks. He was an Associate Editor
of the Virginia Quarterly Review and (following
Professor Kent) the Literary Editor
of the Library of Southern Literature, a
Joint Editor of The Enchanted Years: a
Book of Contemporary Verse and of The
Centennial Volume of the University of
Virginia, and the author of such books as
The Stream of English Biography (1930),
De Quincey, a Portrait (1940), and Know
Your Shakespeare (1949).

At the University of Virginia he received
the Raven Award in 1938 and the Sullivan
Award in 1940. Upon his retirement a volume
of Humanistic Studies was prepared
in his honor. He was a charter member of
the Conference of Deans of Southern Graduate
Schools, an early President of the Association
of Virginia Colleges and of the
Virginia Library Association, one of the
founders of the Virginia Folklore Society,
and he was a member of the Author's Club
of London. Honorary degrees of Litt.D.

were conferred upon him by Georgetown
College, by Baylor University, and by the
University of Kentucky, and the honorary
degree of LL.D. by the University of Richmond.
His portrait, painted in his academic
robes by Frederick Wight, adorns the
Colonnade Club at the University of Virginia.

Professor Metcalf was married in 1891
to Ruth Cooper Sharp, and they had one
son, Victor Sharp Metcalf, a youth of rare
promise, who died while in training as
a soldier in the First World War. He had
been an avid reader, and his father devised
for him a touching memorial, a special alcove
in the University of Richmond Library
in which were placed his favorite
volumes, which were annually augmented
by such new books as would have appealed
to him. The mother died in 1925; and in
1929 Dean Metcalf was married again, to
Edmonia Carrington Lancaster, who with
devoted companionship enriched the later
years of his life, until his death on 9 September
1949. His grave is in the University

Cemetery, not far from the Metcalf Residence
House, and there is a handsome Library
endowment in his memory.