Richard Foster Jones was a professor of English at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, and executive head of the university's English department. His research interests included early modern

Early Modern Britain

Early modern Britain is the history of the island of Great Britain, roughly corresponding to the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Major historical events in Early Modern British history include the English Renaissance, the English Reformation and Scottish Reformation, the English Civil War, the...

 English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 (especially Sir Francis Bacon), the history of science

History of science

The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....

, and the writings of Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

.

Life

Born in Salido, Texas, he was the son of Samuel J. Jones, an educator who had been the head of Salado College before it closed, and who, following the college's closing, established in its former building the Thomas Arnold High School, a private academy which he headed from 1890 until 1913.

Following his graduation from his father's school, Richard Foster Jones attended the University of Texas, from which he received a Bachelor's degree in 1907. He then went on to Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, where he received a Masters Degree in and a Doctorate in 1918. Jones joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

 in 1919 and remained at that school until 1945, by which time he had risen to the position of Dean of the Graduate School.

Though Jones spent only the last seven years of his academic career at Stanford, his name is closely associated with the school. Stanford's Jones Room, a meeting and reading room for students in Stanford's creative writing program, is named for both Richard Foster Jones, who established the program, and his brother, Dr. E. H. Jones, who financed the program's establishment and whose E. H. Jones Endowment has been the primary source of the grants provided to recipients of the program's Stegner Fellowship

Stegner Fellowship

The Stegner Fellowship program is a two-year creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. The award is named after American Wallace Stegner , an historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and Stanford faculty member who founded the university's creative writing program. Ten...

s.

Works

• Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England
• Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of The Battle of the Books. St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1936.
• Bacon, Francis. Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Pieces. New York: Odyssey Press, 1937, editor
• The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope. Stanford University Press, 1951, (with others)
• Triumph of the English Language. Stanford University Press, 1953.