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Portrait of Hollis Summers, Ohio University professor of creativ
35mm B&W film negative, proofsheet 04079, neg 26, 1973. "Summers, Hollis" written on proofsheet. Portrait of Hollis Summers, Ohio University Distinguished Professor and faculty member within the English Department's Creative Writing Program.
Hollis Spurgeon Summers Jr. wrote many novels, collections of poetry and short stories during an award-winning career teaching English at Georgetown College, the University of Kentucky and Ohio University.
Summers was born June 21, 1916, in Eminence, in Henry County, to Hollis Spurgeon Summers Sr., a Baptist minister, and Hazel (Holmes) Summers. He grew up in Campbellsville, Louisville and Madisonville, where he graduated from high school. Summers earned his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown College (1937), a master’s from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont (1943), and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa (1948).
His first published novel was City Limit (1948). It was followed by Brighten the Corner (1952), The Weather of February (1957), The Day After Sunday (1968) and The Garden (1972). His collection How They Chose the Dead: Stories was published in 1973. Many of Summers’ tales were set in Kentucky. A frequent theme was the conflict between religion and romantic love.
After leaving Kentucky for Ohio, Summers also began publishing poetry collections. The Walks Near Athens (1959) was followed by Someone Else (1962), The Peddler and Other Domestic Matters (1967), Occupant Please Forward (1976), Dinosaurs (1977) and After the Twelve Days (1987).
He edited the anthology Kentucky Story (1954) and, with Edgar Wahn, wrote the textbook Literature: An Introduction (1960). He also wrote the suspense novel Teach You a Lesson (1956) under the pseudonym Jim Hollis.
Summers began his teaching career at Holmes High School in Covington, then spent five years at his alma mater, Georgetown College, before joining the University of Kentucky’s English faculty, where he taught from 1949-1959. During that decade, he and colleague Robert Hazel taught and mentored five students who would become famous Kentucky writers: Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman.
Summers was Distinguished Professor of the Year in UK’s College of Fine Arts in 1959. He left UK that year for Ohio University, where he was named the university’s distinguished professor in 1964. Summers spent the rest of his teaching career at Ohio, retiring in 1986. He was a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in 1974 and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1978. The Ohio University Press administers the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, which has a $1,000 cash prize.
Summers died Nov. 14, 1987, at his home in Athens, Ohio, after a long illness and is buried at Millersburg Cemetery in Bourbon County, Kentucky. He was married to Laura Clarke Summers, who died in 2001. They had two sons, Hollis S. Summers III and David Clarke Summers.