Paul Merrill Spurlin

Paul Merrill Spurlin (2 August 1902 – 24 January 1994) was an American scholar of eighteenth-century French and American cultural relations.^[1][2] The University of Georgia Press says he studied at Johns Hopkins University under Gilbert Chinard, an early leader in Franco-American intellectual history.^[1]

Life and career

According to his Find a Grave memorial, Spurlin was born in Georgia on 2 August 1902. He died on 24 January 1994 in Middletown, Connecticut, aged 91, and is buried in St. Andrew's Memorial Cloister Garden in Ann Arbor, Michigan.^[2] This agrees with the death year of 1994 given by the University of Georgia Press.^[1]

A 1947 author's note in the Emory University Quarterly gives his degrees as a Ph.B. from Emory in 1925 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1936.^[3] The 1928 yearbook of Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama lists "Paul Merrill Spurlin" as assistant professor of French, and he was a faculty member of the college's debating fraternity.^[4] In 1937 the AAUP Bulletin listed him among newly elected members from Louisiana State University.^[5] LSU's press published his first book in 1940.^[6]

School and Society reported in July 1946 that Spurlin, whose appointment as professor of French at the University of Alabama it had noted in April 1945, had been named professor of eighteenth-century French literature at the University of Michigan.^[7] By 1947 he was a professor in Michigan's Department of Romance Languages.^[3] In December 1951 The Modern Language Journal reported that he had resigned as associate chairman of the department "in order to devote his time to teaching and scholarship."^[8]

On 17 September 1932 he married Alix Snowden at Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church. The notice in the Washington Evening Star the next day described him as the son of Mrs. Robert Lee Davis of Orlando, Florida, and said he was doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins.^[9] Find a Grave lists his wife as Alix Roberts Snowden Spurlin (1901–1998).^[2]

Scholarship

Spurlin's main argument was that the French philosophes had a large influence in America, especially between 1760 and 1800. He held that Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and others were read closely by leaders of the colonies and the new nation.^[1] His first book, Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801, came out from Louisiana State University Press in 1940 as no. 4 of its Romance language series. It grew out of his 1936 Johns Hopkins dissertation, and Octagon Books reprinted it in 1969.^[6][10] He followed it with Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University of Alabama Press, 1969).^[11][12] He also wrote Readership in the American Enlightenment (1975).^[13] His collected essays, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers, came out from the University of Georgia Press in 1984.^[14] The press reissued them in 2021 with a new foreword by historian Maurizio Valsania.^[1]

His 1947 essay "The American and His Newspaper, 1760–1801" appeared in the Emory University Quarterly.^[3] In a 1976 article in The Modern Language Journal (vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 85–96), "The Founding Fathers and the French Language", he looked at how well American leaders knew French.^[15] Open Library also lists shorter studies of Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments in eighteenth-century America (1963) and of Diderot, d'Alembert and the Encyclopédie in the United States (1967).^[13]

University of Michigan

A bookseller's catalogue records that Spurlin wrote the text for The World of Voltaire, a 42-page catalogue with 30 plates for an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 1969.^[16] The exhibition ran from 30 March to 11 May 1969.^[17]

Reputation

The 2021 reissue presents Spurlin as a founder of research on Franco-American intellectual exchange in the Revolutionary era. It also notes that later historians have criticised his "history from above" for its focus on elite readers.^[1]