Robert Wayne Hamblin (born November 5, 1938)[1] is a poet, an author, and a professor emeritus at Southeast Missouri State University.
After attending Northeast Mississippi Community College, he graduated from Delta State University in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in English education.
[1] Hamblin entered the teaching profession at Sparrows Point High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he taught English and coached baseball.
[1] He began teaching at Southeast Missouri State in 1965[2] and became the founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at the university[3] in 1989.
[4] In 1978 Hamblin met the renowned Faulkner collector Louis Daniel Brodsky and for the next 36 years, until Brodsky's death, the two men collaborated on books, articles, exhibits, lectures, and other public programs based on the materials in Brodsky's Faulkner collection.
As integration occurred at the University of Mississippi, "Faulkner helped me," he said, through the author's treatment of "racial justice, equality and brotherhood and atoning for the sins of the past.
"[5] Both his master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation focused on topics related to Faulkner.
[6] In addition to Hamblin's classroom teaching, he led seminars for the Missouri Humanities Council[4] and the National Endowment for the Humanities and lectured and led seminars about Faulkner across the United States and in China, England, Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, and Taiwan.
In 2005, he was the leader of Oprah's Book Club's online discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
[1] He also edited a newsletter focused on teaching the writings of Faulkner in secondary- and university-level classes[1] and published a variety of works about the author, including Myself & the World: A Biography of William Faulkner.
[7] In addition to his writings about Faulkner, Hamblin's published works cover a variety of topics, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Brodsky, Louis Daniel, and Robert W. Hamblin, eds.
Brodsky, Louis Daniel, and Robert W. Hamblin, eds.
Fargnoli, A. Nicholas, Michael Golay, and Robert W. Hamblin.
A Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work.
Darkness Descending: Love Poems for a Beloved Stricken with Alzheimer’s.
Dust and Light: Poems, After Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Hamblin, Robert W. Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2017.
Hamblin, Robert W. “No Such Thing As Was”: William Faulkner and Southern History.
Southeast Missouri State University: Center for Faulkner Studies, 1994.
Preacher in Overalls: Poems: The Story of Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2010.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2010.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2012; Chinese edition, 2020.
Selections from the William Faulkner Collection of Louis Daniel Brodsky.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2008.
Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2015.