Samuel Hynes, Professor Whose Books Taught Lessons of War, Dies at 94

Hynes’ books “Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator” (1988), a memoir, and “The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War” (1997), a study of memoirs, diaries and other writing about war, delivered civilians to body-strewn battlefields and rat-infested trenches to “answer the essential question,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1995, “the one that people who weren’t there ask of the men who were: What was it like?”

Which was why, he explained, speaking as a prodigious consumer of war literature, “the best-known single sentence to come out of America’s part of World War II is not from a general’s dispatch or a politician’s speech.”

“It is three words from a common soldier whose name stood for every soldier: ‘Kilroy was here.’”

Each set of initials scratched on foreign monuments, each photograph or amateurish memoir, Hynes wrote, was like those three words — some GI’s impulsive pursuit of immortality in the face of death. “He was placing himself in history, “ he wrote, “recording that once in his life he had been present where great public events were happening.”

Enraptured by airplanes from childhood, Hynes flew 78 combat missions over the Pacific. He once described flying as “a life, like a sex life, that no normal guy would give up if he didn’t absolutely have to.”

But the dozens of books he wrote, contributed to and edited were not all drenched in blood and guts. Among the more composed were his dissections of Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Edwardian novels and the work of W.H. Auden and his contemporaries.

Daniel Menaker, who studied under Hynes at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1949 to 1968, and who went on to become executive editor-in-chief of Random House, wrote of him in an email:

“Of the beginning of Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’— ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still’ — he asked, ‘Where are we here?’ Those of us insecure males who may have hesitated about the seeming effeteness of this kind of study decided it might be OK if taught by a fighter pilot, up from poverty, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for ‘heroism or extraordinary achievement.’”

Hynes had no doubt why he was there, as a critic and a teacher, although not everyone would have defined those roles in precisely the terms he used.

“Criticism is, as we have seen, not a way of reading and explaining literature, but a way of rewriting it,” he observed in “Flights of Passage.” “This confuses writers, who tend to think that critics are people competent to give credible and sensible interpretations of the content and intention of their work.”

University teachers, he added, are employed to “contest the prevailing paradigmatic hegemonies, to prove the absence of the author, the death of the subject, the incongruity of the reader, and also to invigilate examinations when required.”

Samuel Lynn Hynes Jr. was born on Aug. 29, 1925, in Chicago and grew up in Minneapolis. His mother, Barbara (Turner) Hynes, died when he was 5. During the Depression, Samuel Sr., seeking work, took Sam and his brother, Charles, across the country before returning to Chicago for a factory job on the South Side.

“All my working life I’ve had two vocations — flying and professing,” Hynes once wrote.

Watching others fly came first. As a young boy, arms outstretched, he would circle schoolmates in the playground, emulating World War I aces. He would also ride his bicycle to the local airport and gape at the rudimentary planes.

“I was not, even in imagination, a pilot,” he wrote in his memoir, “but I was a true believer in the religion of flight.”

He graduated from high school at 16 and in 1942 entered the University of Minnesota, where he studied under novelist Robert Penn Warren. He signed up for the Navy flight program there and was called up the next spring. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marines, he served in a Marine torpedo bombing squadron in the Caroline Islands and Okinawa. He was discharged as a major.

In 1944 he married Elizabeth Ann Igleheart, the sister of a fellow pilot; she died in 2008. In addition to his daughter Joanna, he is survived by another daughter, Miranda Preston; a granddaughter, Lucy; two grandsons, Alex Preston, a British novelist and critic, and Samuel Preston, lead singer of the English rock band the Ordinary Boys; and three great-grandchildren.

Hynes turned 21 two weeks after the war ended. He returned to the University of Minnesota and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1947. He then earned a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University under the GI Bill.

He joined the Swarthmore faculty to teach British literature and left in 1968 for Northwestern. He remained there until 1976, when he moved to Princeton. He retired as Woodrow Wilson professor of literature emeritus in 1990.

“I loved him, and I loved what he made us study,” Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who took Hynes’ freshman course, said by email. “I then proudly turned in my first paper, which he returned with a C+ and a very brief comment: ‘No thesis, no argument, hence no paper.’”

Hynes once described writing as “revealing oneself to excess.” Reviewing his book “The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s” (1977), Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Hynes “writes with exemplary grace and clarity, and with not a trace of the jargon and obscurantism that increasingly characterize the output of academic factories these days.”

He was an articulate speaker, too. He delivered authoritative commentary in all seven episodes of “The War,” Ken Burns’ 2007 documentary about World War II.

War was his métier.

He defined it as “a violent and dangerous world where, out there in the darkness or just over the hill, strangers wait whose job it is to kill you.” In Vietnam, he wrote in “The Soldiers’ Tale,” “winning or losing could only be calculated by the number of people you had killed.” What war is not, he wrote, is “an occasional interruption of a normality called peace; it is a climate in which we live.”

Alex Preston, his grandson and literary executor, sought to reconcile Hynes’ roles as a gladiatorial warrior and a pensive professor who continued writing almost to the end. (His “The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War” was published in 2014, when he was 90.)

“He was basically still a child when he went to war, but it gave a shape to his life as a man and as a writer,” Preston said by email. “Writing was the way he understood the world and made sense of the mixture of fear and exultation that was his experience of the war.”

“He was never interested in the politics and posturing of academic life,” Preston added, “He was always a soldier, even when sitting in what was almost literally an ivory tower above Firestone Library in Princeton.”

This article originally appeared in

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Samuel Hynes, Professor Whose Books Taught Lessons of War, Dies at 94

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