Sturgis Elleno Leavitt
Encyclopedia
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
, the author of many books on Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
language and literature, the president of several Spanish language teaching organizations, an adviser to the U.S. State Department and for many years the chairman of the Southern Humanities Conference as well as editor of the Hispanic Review.
Sturgis Leavitt was born on January 24, 1888, in Newhall, Maine
Cumberland County, Maine
Cumberland County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maine. As of 2010, the population was 281,674. Its county seat is Portland, and is the most populous of the sixteen Maine counties, as well as the most affluent. Cumberland County has the deepest and second largest body of water in the...
, the son of William H. Leavitt and his wife Mary Ellen (Sturgis). After attending high school in nearby Gorham, Maine
Gorham, Maine
Gorham is a town in Cumberland County, Maine, United States. The population was 16,381 at the 2010 census. In addition to an urban village center known as Gorham Village or simply "the Village," the town also encompasses a number of smaller, unincorporated villages and hamlets with distinct...
, Leavitt was educated at Bowdoin College
Bowdoin College
Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...
, Brunswick, Maine
Brunswick, Maine
Brunswick is a town in Cumberland County, Maine, United States. The population was 20,278 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Portland-South Portland-Biddeford metropolitan area. Brunswick is home to Bowdoin College, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, , and the...
, and then at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1917. Between stints at Harvard Graduate School, Leavitt taught at Jackson Military Academy in Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, Cushing Academy
Cushing Academy
Cushing Academy is a coeducational college preparatory boarding school for grades 9 through 12 plus an optional postgraduate year located in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1865 in fulfilment of a bequest by Thomas Parkman Cushing and opened in 1875, and is sometimes cited as the...
in Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
and at Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...
.
Following his graduation from Harvard, where he was awarded the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, Leavitt embarked on a trip to South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
. For the next two years, he traveled between Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
, Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
, Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
and Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
. Following his tour of South America, Leavitt returned to America, where he was offered a junior teaching job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
in 1917. Following his Harvard graduation, Leavitt eventually become full professor and later Kenan Professor of Spanish.
The Maine native's early days in the South as a professor of Spanish studies were not without trials. "In 1930 Southern colleges and universities lagged far behind the great Northern and (some) Western universities", writes professor Clifford Lyons of UNC Chapel Hill. "We had few distinguished scholars and most of them did not have access to a first-class university library." Eventually, because of the efforts of Leavitt and scholars like him, the universities and colleges of the south were able to build modern language departments of stature. "All that has changed, and I think SAMLA had a lot to do with it", writes Lyons. (In the part of the twentieth century, other notable Southern scholars in other fields also fled northward, including Yale University's
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
, a native of Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
, and Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, writer, Yale professor and fellow Kentucky native.)
In 1935 the young Spanish professor and Maine native helped found and became editor of The South Atlantic Bulletin, a publication addressed to the Southern Hemisphere of North America. The first issue appeared in May 1935 in broadside format, approximately 11x16 inches. The inaugural issue carried a statement of purpose which made clear that the bulletin would examine all aspects of the field, including the treatment of those teaching in it:
"It [the Bulletin] should publish, for example, descriptions of important collections in the libraries of the Southeast, and reviews and notices of scholarly publications by our members", Leavitt wrote. "It should also make known the results of investigations regarding the attitudes of school authorities toward research, sabbatical leaves, and related problems." Leavitt proposed to charge $1 for annual dues – a figure that held for the next 20 years (until 1955). Leavitt remained the Bulletin's editor until 1950, and managed to publish an issue on time each out of readers' annual dues.
In 1956 Leavitt was elected to the board of the national Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
, on which he served three years. He later served as Director of Inter-America Institute, a school for large groups of teachers and students from Latin American countries. Leavitt served as president of the AATSP from 1945–46, and as member of the editor's advisory council for Hispania magazine for many years. The bibliography
Bibliography
Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...
that Leavitt maintained of Hispanic literature has been called one of his notable contributions to the field of Spanish language studies.
Sturgis Leavitt was awarded honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters
Doctor of Letters
Doctor of Letters is a university academic degree, often a higher doctorate which is frequently awarded as an honorary degree in recognition of outstanding scholarship or other merits.-Commonwealth:...
by Davidson College
Davidson College
Davidson College is a private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina. The college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine, although it has recently dropped to 11th in U.S. News...
and by his alma mater Bowdoin. In the citation Bowdoin College called Leavitt "one of the leading scholars and teachers of the Spanish language and literature in the United States", who had helped "bring about a better understanding with our neighbors to the South, showing what the academic world can do to strengthen inter-American ties."
In 1974 he was made a member of the Mexican Academy
Academia Mexicana de la Lengua
The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua is the correspondent academy in Mexico of the Royal Spanish Academy...
. The same year he was also installed as one of the first members of the Academy of Spanish Language in the United States. In 1972 he had been named one of the nation's top ten Spanish language scholars by a Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
literary journal.
The Sturgis Elleno Leavitt Award of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, with which Leavitt was long associated, is named for him. Leavitt and his wife, the former Alga Webber, long lived at 718 East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they built a New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
-style white clapboard home.
Professor Leavitt's papers are deposited at the Manuscripts Department of the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Maine native was a longtime member of the Mayflower Society. Leavitt died on March 3, 1976, at North Carolina Memorial Hospital; his wife Alga had died a decade earlier. Leavitt's teaching career at UNC spanned 43 years (1917–60), and until his death he worked each day at his desk in the University's Dey Hall, center of the language programs he helped nurture.
Leavitt's wife was an editor and writer who was the author of Stories and Poems from the Old South: Edited by Mrs. Sturgis Elleno Leavitt (Alga Leavitt) published by the Seeman Printery at Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
in 1923. An amateur actress, Alga Leavitt had earlier worked with author Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
at the North Carolina Playmakers, an amateur theatrical group.