Marshall William Fishwick (5 July 1923–22 May 2006), writer and professor of popular culture studies, was born in Roanoke and was the son of William Fishwick and Nellie Cross Fishwick. He attended Roanoke's public schools, graduated from Jefferson High School in 1940, and received a scholarship from the University of Virginia. In 1942, Fishwick enrolled in a naval reserve program, which allowed him to accelerate through his undergraduate program before entering the navy. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in October 1943.

Fishwick entered the navy's midshipman's program in January 1944, completed the training in May 1944, and received a commission as an ensign. He reported to the USS ATR 8, a rescue tug based out of Staten Island, New York, where he spent the remainder of the World War II. On 12 July 1945, Fishwick married Lucy Joan Farley in Madison, Wisconsin. They had three daughters and one son. While still in the navy, Fishwick began writing essays and poetry and in 1945 he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Face of Jang. Fishwick completed his active duty on 13 April 1946 and returned to Madison, where later that year he completed a master's degree in history at the University of Wisconsin. Fishwick then enrolled in the doctoral program at Yale University in the emerging field of American Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in 1949 with a dissertation entitled "Virginia, 1902–1941: A Cultural History." Fishwick published a revised version of it in 1959 with the title Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion.

In 1949 Fishwick joined the faculty at Washington and Lee University and assisted in launching a new American Studies program. During his tenure there as chair of the department until 1962, he flourished and taught hundreds of students, including journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe. A prolific scholar, Fishwick published nine books in those thirteen years and helped define American Studies as a multidisciplined tract that included history, literature, education, theology, and communications.

Fishwick left Washington and Lee in 1962 to direct the Wemyss Foundation, in Wilmington, Delaware. Shortly thereafter, he met Ray B. Browne and Russel B. Nye, who shared his interest in popular culture, an emerging field within American Studies. By the end of the decade they had successfully launched popular culture as a new academic discipline. During the 1960s they founded the Popular Culture Association, of which Fishwick served as president for several years, started journals including the Journal of Popular Culture and International Popular Culture, published numerous books and articles on the discipline, and cultivated a growing membership of popular culture scholars.

With the help of eight Fulbright scholarships he received during his career, Fishwick traveled extensively, taking his ideas about popular culture to Denmark, Italy, Germany, India, Korea, Bangladesh, Poland, and Russia. He brought new students to the field through teaching and as chair of the Departments of American Studies at Lincoln University from 1964 to 1970 and at Temple University from 1970 until 1976. During this period, Fishwick and his wife divorced, but both later remarried. He married Ann Chandler on 19 August 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. They had no children.

Fishwick returned to Virginia in 1976 as professor of communication and humanities at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). From then until his retirement in 2003, he registered an extraordinary record of accomplishment, diversifying his research and teaching on topics such as Superman, historic preservation of buildings, electronic media, and mythological heroes. Fishwick was instrumental in creating an American Studies concentration at the university, wrote or edited more than twenty books, and taught courses that often drew more than four hundred students. His decades of work in the fields of American Studies and popular culture earned him a lifetime achievement award from the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association, an outstanding teaching award from Virginia Tech, and honorary doctorates from Krakov University, Bombay University, and Dhaka University.

On 3 August 1993, Fishwick and his second wife divorced. He married Ann F. Laberge, a historian of medicine who had been a guest lecturer in one of his classes, on 10 June 1995, in New Haven, Connecticut. They had no children. Marshall William Fishwick died at his home in Blacksburg on 22 May 2006 and was buried in Evergreen Burial Park in Roanoke. The following year his final book was published, Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture.

Sources Consulted:
Fishwick's autobiographical manuscript, "Growing Up and Moving Out" (2004), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Marshall W. Fishwick Papers, 1959–1982, Special Collections and University Archives, Carol M. Newman Library, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, including journals, 1940s–2002, and CV; first marriage in Marriage Register, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Madison, and reported in Roanoke World News, 9 July 1945; second marriage in Divorce Decree, Montgomery Co., Division of Vital Records, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); third marriage in Connecticut Marriage Index, 1897–2001, State Vital Records Office, Hartford; Ray B. Browne, Against Academia: The History of the Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association and the Popular Culture Movement, 1967–1988 (1989); Fishwick interview in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present (fall 2003); obituaries in Washington Post, 24 May 2006, Roanoke Times, 24, 25 May 2006, and Virginia Tech Magazine (Summer 2006), 38; memorial in Perspectives on History 45 (Jan. 2007): 41, portrait.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Aaron D. Purcell.

How to cite this page:
Aaron D. Purcell, "Marshall William Fishwick (1923–2006)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fishwick_Marshall_William, accessed [today's date]).

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