Douglas Turner Day (1 May 1932–10 October 2004), literary scholar, was born in Colón, Republic of Panama, and was the son of Bess Turner Nelson Day and her second husband, Douglas Turner Day, an officer in the United States Navy. His father's family had lived in Fauquier County, Virginia, since the nineteenth century, and in 1947, while his parents were still stationed abroad, Day moved to Alexandria to attend Episcopal High School. Having accumulated an abundance of demerits, he left the school to enlist in the United States Marine Corps but then withdrew from basic training and entered a private high school in Maryland. After graduating, Day matriculated at the United States Naval Academy, but academic and disciplinary problems prompted his departure. He enrolled at the University of Virginia, paid little attention to academics, and served in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. Day received a bachelor's degree in 1954 and on 3 July of that year married Mary Hill Noble, the daughter of a rear admiral. They had two sons and two daughters (one of whom died in infancy) before they divorced on 25 May 1967. Day had one son with Elisabeth Marie Holscher, whom he married in Charlottesville on 8 June 1967 and divorced on 12 May 1978. In London on 27 June 1979 Day married Gay Allis Rose Clifford, an English poet who taught at the University of Virginia; they divorced on 4 May 1982. On 18 December 1982 he married a fourth time, but his union with Nancy Ellen Willner ended in divorce on 26 October 1988. He married Sheila Marie McMillen in Albemarle County on 2 July 1990.
Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after finishing college, Douglas Turner Day III, as he was usually known, piloted jets until he was severely injured in a racecar accident in 1955. He left active duty and returned to the University of Virginia, where he received an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in English in 1962. Becoming a member of the English department faculty, Day built a reputation as a charismatic and respected professor of modern literature who charmed students with his good looks, colorful persona, and incisive lectures. He brought the work of William Faulkner to life with firsthand anecdotes of his experiences as Faulkner's graduate student late in the 1950s, when the author had been a writer-in-residence at the university. In 1977 Day was named Commonwealth Professor of English, and he served as the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English and Comparative Literature from 1992 until he retired in 2000. He remained director of the university's creative writing program in retirement.
Fluent in Spanish and fascinated by Hispanic culture, Day introduced his students to such Latin authors as Jorge Louis Borgés, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who were then relatively unknown in North America. During the 1965–1966 academic year he lectured in Spain at the University of Zaragoza as a Fulbright visiting professor and on another occasion traveled extensively and lectured in Central and South America for the United States Information Agency. Day received other academic grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Day's Swifter Than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves (1963) extended work he had done in his dissertation. In 1974 Day won the National Book Award for biography with Malcolm Lowry (1973), which chronicled the English writer's drunken struggles to produce his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), and included an exegesis of that densely allusive work. With Lowry's widow, Day had edited and published Lowry's posthumous novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1968). In 1973 Day edited Faulkner's novel Flags in the Dust, first published in 1929 as Sartoris, and restored the work to its original form. He also edited The Rural Trilogy: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and the House of Bernarda Alba (1987), a collection of plays by Federico García Lorca published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the poet and playwright's murder. Day's novel Journey of the Wolf (1977), about a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who returns to his home village after three decades of exile in France, won the 1978 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Another novel, The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magón, set in Mexico, appeared in 1991.
Often perceived as a free spirit, Day's friends and students alike delighted in stories of Day's derring-do. He belonged to the South American Explorers Club and in 1995 was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. In February 2004 Douglas Turner Day suffered a debilitating stroke, and on 10 October of that year he shot and killed himself at his home in Albemarle County. He was buried near his parents in Warrenton Cemetery, in Fauquier County.
Sources Consulted:
Birth date in Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; information provided by widow Sheila McMillen (2008) and son Douglas Turner Day IV (2005); Day, "The Quiet Place," introductory essay in Robert Llewellyn, The Academical Village: Thomas Jefferson's University (1982); University of Virginia Alumni News 62 (July/Aug. 1974): 8–9; New York Times, 8 Nov. 1973; Washington Post, 28 Feb. 1977, 7 May 1978; obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16, 17 Oct. 2004, Washington Post, 16 Oct. 2004, Charlottesville Daily Progress, 17 Oct. 2004, and New York Times, 19 Oct. 2004; memorial in Charlottesville Inside UVA, 29 Oct. 2004 (with portrait).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Lucy Southall Colebaugh.
How to cite this page:
Lucy Southall Colebaugh,"Douglas Turner Day (1932–2004)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Day_Douglas_Turner, accessed [today's date]).
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