Julian Dewey Mason (1931-2018)

The Department of English is sad to acknowledge the death of Julian Dewey Mason who was a distiguished scholar of American Literature. Mason, who began his career at Chapel Hill, was Chair of the English Department at UNC Charlotte for many years, helping to shape the program into one of the most distinguished programs on campus and in the region. Mason’s The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1966) has been the standard edition of the poems and letters of a critically important black poet of eighteenth-century Boston, and was a pioneering work in the African-American studies.

Throughout his life, he had a great love for rare books and manuscripts (he spent two years working at the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress), and over the years has contributed dozens of important volumes to the Atkins Library Division of Rare Books. He also endowed a series of lectures on Rare Books by internationally renowned speakers, sponsored by the Library and the Department of English. His legacy will continue to benefit all students and faculty at UNC Charlotte, and every patron of UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library. We will commemorate Dr. Mason and his contributions at the forthcoming Rare Books talk on April 10th, 2018 in the Halton Room of Atkins Library).