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Photo: Amanda Lane |
Teacher and Writer
The impact of Diane Wood Middlebrook's lifetime of teaching shows in the generations of writers and academics she mentored. Some keep a long-ago-yellowed syllabus in their files. Others may describe the moment when exposure to Middlebrook's intellectual passion piqued their interest.
Middlebrook, a feminist scholar, professor emerita of English and renowned biographer, died December 15 after a long bout with cancer. She was 68.
Born in Pocatello, Idaho, and raised in Washington state, Middlebrook was once described by her sister as a “changeling”—unique in a family where no one read poetry, let alone studied it. Yet for Middlebrook, writing was a calling.
She attended Whitman College before transferring to the University of Washington to earn her bachelor's degree. By 1966, she was an assistant professor at Stanford. She earned her PhD from Yale in 1968. In the 1970s she was tapped for Stanford's Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research) and served as its director from 1977 to 1979. She retired in 2002 to write full time.
Her biography of poet Anne Sexton spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, in part because she had secured permission to use recordings of Sexton's psychotherapy sessions as research material. Although Anne Sexton raised questions about the ultimate confidentiality of patients' records, it became a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two other biographies were also bestsellers: Suits Me, the story of Billy Tipton (a female jazz musician who lived for 50 years as a man), and Her Husband, about the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Middlebrook's crowning achievement, however, was expected to be a biography of the ageless poet Ovid, to be published this year, some 2000 years after he walked and wrote in the streets of Rome.
Twice divorced, Middlebrook was becoming an intellectual celebrity in her own right when, in 1985, she married another: professor emeritus of chemistry Carl Djerassi, famous as the “father of the Pill.”
In a 2003 Stanford story, history professor Estelle Freedman spoke admiringly of Middlebrook: “Often, when I have to be 'on,' as at public events, I think 'WWDD.' Instead of 'What would Jesus do?' it is 'What would Diane do?' And I reach deep inside for a touch of spark, wit, words and connecting thoughts that might, in her style, embrace those around me with the intellectual and personal vibrancy that she brings with her always.”
In addition to her husband, Middlebrook is survived by her daughter, Leah Middlebrook; her stepson, Dale Djerassi; a step-grandson, and two sisters.
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Photo: Mary Frances Howard |
The Record Setter
James Stephen Fossett first performed an extraordinary act of endurance during Big Game week his senior year. He swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz in 48-degree water. When he scrambled out of the choppy surf and unveiled his Beat Cal banner, prison guards promptly shoved him back in the water (but not before a photographer could get a picture of the banner). Six hours later, he dragged himself to shore near Fisherman's Wharf, hypothermic, exhausted and in possession of a new purpose in life. “It was the first and last stunt I undertook purely for publicity winning purposes,” Fossett wrote in his autobiography, Chasing the Wind. “After that triumph, my motivation for achieving my goals in adventure pursuits would be for my own personal satisfaction.”
A world-famous adventurer and the first person to circle the planet alone in a hot-air balloon, Fossett, '66, disappeared during a solo flight in Nevada on September 3. The man who survived numerous crashes, including a nearly 30,000-foot drop in a balloon, was presumed dead after an intensive monthlong search found no sign of him or his single-engine aircraft. He was 63 years old.
An Eagle Scout, the Stanford economics major and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brother earned an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. After making his fortune with his brokerage firms Lakota Trading, Marathon Securities and Larkspur Securities, he retired in 1990. He was already devoted to endurance sports and events such as the Iditarod and the Ironman triathlon.
During his career, he set more than 100 world records or world firsts. Among those was the longest nonstop flight in aviation history, 26,389 miles in 76 hours.
He made the first solo Pacific crossing in 1995 and then took six attempts to travel around the world, accomplishing the feat in 2002 after 14 days and 19 hours. He was elected to the U.S. National Aviation Hall of Fame and was awarded a medal from the International Aeronautics Federation. At the time of his disappearance, he was working toward an attempt to break the land-speed record in a jet-powered race car. The challenge was to take place in 2008 in the northern Nevada desert.
He is survived by his wife of 38 years, Peggy. |
