Author Information:
Charles Samuels was a professor of English and of Film Studies at Williams College in the 1960s and part of the 1970s. He was, by near all accounts of former students, a terrifying presence in the classroom – not maniacally nor physically nor in volume but in intellect, in rigor and in relentlessness. To a loner, as I was, he was a sharper, clearer edge than I had ever seen or imagined, a force of other nature. He read books with an almost gleeful ferocity and it took no moment to realize that I was moving not too slowly but in truth not moving. I was a tourist to reading. Samuels was a Brooklyn native, a graduate of Syracuse (B.A.) Ohio State (M.A.) and Cal Berkeley(PhD) a Phi Beta Kappa and he came to teach at Williams in 1961 as a 25 year old. Williams was proud of its English Department – they were a little surly, irreverent, and wry. Many of them smoked and peered, and poked and laughed with some profanity and they knew Chaucer and Milton and Joyce and they knew that none of them was an angel. They drank and loved food with more than decorum and they were all a little tweedy. Williams is a tweedy valley.
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