Louis D. Rubin Jr.

[1] He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;[1] and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers.

In his memoir, An Honorable Estate: My Time in the Working Press, Rubin describes a career that began with covering local news and sports for several Charleston newspapers and at the Army paper at Ft. Benning during the war, then continued after the war with stints as a reporter, editor, and rewrite man for papers in Hackensack, NJ and Staunton, VA, and with the Associated Press in Richmond, VA.[7] Having grown frustrated with the lack of creativity at his rewrite job with the Associated Press, he took advantage of GI Bill benefits to enroll in 1948 in the Department of Writing, Speech and Drama (later the Writing Seminars) at Johns Hopkins.

[1] After receiving a Ph.D in an interdepartmental program in aesthetics and literary theory, he served as Executive Secretary for the American Studies Association from 1954–1956, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

[6] In 1956 and 1957 Rubin briefly returned to journalism as an editorial writer for the Richmond News Leader, which was ardent in its support of Virginia's segregationist policy of Massive Resistance.

[10] He brought noted authors such as Eudora Welty, Howard Nemerov and William Golding to campus as writers-in-residence, founded the Hollins Critic literary journal, and in 1960 established a co-ed graduate-level creative writing program at the women's college.

[10] Rubin's tenure at Hollins (1957–67) coincided with societal changes that saw women from the school aspiring to make a mark professionally in the arts, the sciences, and in business.

[1] Many of Rubin's students at UNC-Chapel Hill went on to become noted scholars in their own right, and he continued to teach courses in creative writing and English to future novelists including Jill McCorkle and Kaye Gibbons.