Necrology

Roy Raymond Male, Jr. '39

Mar. 15, 1919-Jun. 17, 2005

Roy Raymond Male, Jr. ’39, who retired as the David Ross Boyd Professor of English after 30 years of teaching at the University of Oklahoma, was born on March 15, 1919, in Brooklyn, NY. His parents were Roy R. and Mary Brooks Male, both teachers. Roy Male, known as “Ray,” grew up in Brooklyn, where he was graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School. With its principal’s recommendation that he was “one of the finest boys we ever had in [the school],” he entered the College in 1935. An ardent and talented tennis player, he lettered in the sport, and also worked on Hamilton Life, becoming its news editor. A member of Lambda Chi Alpha and recipient of the William Duncan Saunders Prize for writing, he left the Hill with a B.S. degree in 1939.

Ray Male returned to New York City, where he earned an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1940. That year he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private. Promoted to sergeant and later commissioned as an officer in the field artillery, he served throughout World War II. Assigned to the Pacific theater, he was stationed in the Philippines and in Japan after the war’s end.

Ray Male, who left military service as a first lieutenant in 1946, rejoined his wife, the former Carolyn Conlisk, whom he had met in Texas and married on August 19, 1944, at Ft. Benning, GA. After the war, she persuaded him to pursue Ph.D. studies in English at the University of Texas, her own alma mater. It was in need of instructors at a time when returning veterans were flooding into the university, and Ray Male soon found himself teaching four sections of freshman English in addition to his graduate studies. Nonetheless, with a dissertation on Shelley’s moral ideas, he acquired his Ph.D. in 1950.

That year, Ray Male joined the faculty of what is now Texas Tech University in Lubbock as an assistant professor. He coached tennis on the side. Soon thereafter, he obtained a Ford Foundation fellowship for a year of study at Harvard University. By that time, he was focusing his interest on American literature and especially Hawthorne. In 1955, he left Texas Tech for the University of Oklahoma. Promoted to full professor in 1961, he was named to the Boyd chair in 1969.

In addition to numerous scholarly articles and co-authorship of a highly regarded textbook, Reading and Writings (1954), Professor Male was the author of two notable monographs, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (1957) and Enter, Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction (1979). He also edited Types of Short Fiction (1961) and coedited American Literary Masters (1965). His last major published work as editor was Money Talks (1981), which explored the relationship between language and money.

Ray Male, a former president of the South Central Modern Language Association, considered himself “primarily a teacher who has enjoyed writing on the side.” A recipient in 1966 of the University of Oklahoma’s Regents Award for Superior Teaching, he was appointed as a Boyd Professor in recognition of his counseling and guidance of students as well as his teaching excellence and contributions to scholarship. Later in life, Ray Male stated that he had tried as best he could to emulate Hamilton’s Professor Thomas McN. Johnston (“the best teacher of writing I’ve ever known”), not only as a teacher but as a “compassionate, humorous critic and helper” to his students.

Soon after his retirement in 1984, Ray Male packed up his tennis racquet as well as his guitar, and he and his wife Carolyn moved to Hilton Head, SC. There Ray continued to play tennis avidly and frequently. When not on the courts or at home listening to jazz and enjoying letters received from his former students, he liked to travel and explore South Carolina’s low country.

Roy Raymond Male died in Hilton Head on June 17, 2005. In addition to his wife of 60 years, he is survived by a daughter, Marilyn C. Brick; a son, Frank W. Male; and a grandson.

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