Rita Kaplan Gollin (1928–2022) was a professor of English and a scholar of

American literature American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also inc ...

Life and career

Rita Gollin was born Rita Kaplan on January 22, 1928, in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated ''magna cum laude'' from

Queens College Queens College (QC) is a public college in the Queens borough of New York City. It is part of the City University of New York system. Its 80-acre campus is primarily located in Flushing, Queens. It has a student body representing more than 170 ...

with a B.A. in English in 1949, and received her M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1950. She earned her doctorate in English from the same university in 1961 under Professor C. H. Foster. She was a professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Geneseo from 1967 to 2002, where she was named Distinguished Professor in 1995. Before that, she taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Rochester. She was a scholar of the life and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, on whom she has authored several books and many articles. Her 1979 book, ''Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams'', published by the Louisiana State University Press, is consistently included in Hawthorne bibliographies. Her later publications pursued visual-textual studies, focusing on the iconography of Hawthorne portraiture, and a biography of Hawthorne's publisher's wife, "Annie Adams Fields, Woman of Letters." She also edited scholarly editions of Hawthorne's '' The Scarlet Letter''. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as the Grace Ellis Ford Fellowship from the

AAUW The American Association of University Women (AAUW), officially founded in 1881, is a non-profit organization that advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, and research. The organization has a nationwide network of 170,000 ...

and a State University of New York Research Foundation Fellowship. She was president of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society from 1981 to 1982 and of the Northeast

Modern Language Association of America The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

(MLA) from 1978 to 1979.

Personal life

She married Dick Gollin in 1950. They lived in Rochester, New York, and had three children; their son Michael died of ALS. She died at 94 on August 7, 2022.

Legacy

Upon her retirement in 2002, Gollin endowed the Department of English at SUNY Geneseo with the ''Rita K. Gollin Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature''. The award goes to one graduating senior and one junior who have demonstrated excellence in the study of American literature.

References

1928 births 20th-century American non-fiction writers Living people University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni People from Brooklyn State University of New York at Geneseo faculty American women non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers American women academics 21st-century American women {{US-English-academic-bio-stub