Marius began life as a farmboy in East Tennessee, evolved into a fiery figure of 1960s campus political activism, and became a respected Reformation historian on the Harvard faculty. Through it all, he had a complicated and lifelong engagement with Christianity, wrestling with matters of faith...and its loss—both in his scholarship and in his novels.
Childhood
Marius was born in Dixie Lee Junction, Tennessee, on July 29, 1933, and grew up on a 20-acre Loudon County, Tennessee [1] farm along with a sister and two brothers. His father was an immigrant from Greece who earned a chemical engineering degree in Belgium before settling in the United States, where he managed the foundry at the Lenoir Car Works of the Southern Railway. His mother was a former reporter for
The Knoxville News-Sentinel in the 1920s and 1930s.
Religion
Marius' mother, Eunice, was a devout Southern Baptist and fundamentalist Christian whose religious faith had a particularly strong influence over him. His love of literature and poetic imagery may have been formed by her habit of reading to her children every day fromthe King James Version of the Bible. After Marius' older brother was born with Down syndrome, his mother told Marius how she had prayed that if her next son were born healthy, he would devote himself to Jesus. Richard Marius was born healthy.
As a young man, Marius shared his mother's fundamentalism, attending daily Christian services and carrying a Bible with him in college. He even felt a calling to be a minister, earning a divinity degree. But he grew increasingly skeptical of religion and lost his faith in his 20's, even though he would devote much of the rest of his life to studying Reformation-era Christianity. Marius would later attribute his loss of faith in part to his intellectual engagement with W.T. Stace, an English-born philosopher. He was particularly affected by Stace's essay
Man Against Darkness, which includes the statement that:
- The problem of evil assumes the existence of a world-purpose. What, we are really asking, is the purpose of suffering? It seems purposeless. Our question of the why of evil assumes the view that the world has a purpose, and what we want to know is how suffering fits into and advances this purpose. The modern view is that suffering has no purpose because nothing that happens has any purpose: the world is run by causes, not by purposes.
His novel
An Affair of Honor (2001) features a protagonist, Charles Alexander, who like Marius becomes caught between the traditional morality of his upbringing and the freethinking he encounters at University of Tennessee and in W.T. Stace. As Marius evolved toward atheism, he developed what would become a lifelong distaste for the religious right. But toward the end of his life, he began attending services again, first at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard and later at a Unitarian church.
Education
Marius earned a B.S. in journalism in 1954 from the University of Tennessee, where he first gained recognition for his writing skills. Attending college classes in the morning, he worked in the afternoons as a reporter for the
Lenoir City News, writing a column called "Rambling with Richard." In 1955, he married Gail Smith; they would have two children, Richard and Fred, before later divorcing. Marius then enrolled in a divinity program at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary despite an increasing crisis of faith. He took a year off, spending 1956-57 in Europe as a Rotary Fellow in history at the University of Strasbourg, then returned to another Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, from which he graduated with a B.D. in 1958. Immediately afterward, he moved to New Haven, Connecticut to begin graduate work in Reformation history at Yale University. Marius earned a M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962, after writing a dissertation entitled "Thomas More and the Heretics."
University of Tennessee
After graduating from Yale, Marius taught history at Gettysburg College from 1962–1964 before returning to his home state to take a position on the faculty of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. According to his friend and colleague, University of Tennessee professor Milton Klein, Marius quickly became one of the most popular humanities teachers on the campus:
- At Tennessee, he acquired a reputation as a brilliant teacher ... earning the respect and admiration of a host of undergraduate and graduate students. He was one of those rare teachers whose 8 a.m. classes in Western Civilization were filled to capacity and whose lectures were so interesting that unregistered students sought to sneak in to hear them. His popularity was not diminished by his avoidance of short answer tests and his insistence that each student write a short essay every two weeks.
During this period, Marius also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and an early organizer of protests against the conflict, as well as against the Ku Klux Klan. Most notably, he co-organized a protest at a 1970 Billy Graham evangelistic crusade rally in the university's football stadium at which President Richard Nixon appeared shortly after the Kent State shootings. Although Marius' plan was for the 1,000 or so anti-war protesters to hold a "silent" protest amid the 70,000 pro-Graham spectators in the stadium, the protest turned unruly.
Marius also joined three other junior faculty members that year in suing the university when its chancellor refused to allow the black comedian and anti-war activist Dick Gregory to speak on campus, winning a court order to create an "open campus" by ending a university policy of requiring administrative approval before student-invited speakers could come to the campus. He also successfully pushed to end the university's practice of holding sectarian religious convocations.
Marius' sometimes provocative statements and political efforts, which clashed with the prevailing view in the conservative state of Tennessee, led to threats against him and his family. During the Dick Gregory fight, he purchased a revolver for protection, which he said he sometimes slept with.
This intense period was also marked by other beginnings, Marius wrote his first novel,
The Coming of Rain, which was published in 1969. The following year, he married Lanier Smythe, an art historian who later became chair of humanities at Boston's Suffolk University; they had a son named John. In 1974, he published his first scholarly book, a short biography of Martin Luther (a subject to which he would return in full 25 years later). In 1976, he published his second novel,
Bound for the Promised Land.Although Marius would leave Tennessee for Harvard in 1978, he maintained his ties to his home state's university. For example, he founded and directed an annual summer writing conference, the Governor's Academy for Teachers of Writing, on the Knoxville campus. In 1999, the University of Tennessee College of Communications gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Harvard University
In 1978, Marius joined Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he was the director of the Expository Writing Program from 1978 to 1994. Marius would spent the last 20 years of his life at Harvard, producing most of his major work there, including his major biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther and his final two novels.
In addition to his work as director of the writing program, his scholarly research, and his fiction writing, Marius taught a series of courses for the university's Department of English and American Literature and Language. He taught a lecture course on William Shakespeare's history plays and a freshman-only seminar on Southern writers, focusing on Mark Twain and William Faulkner. He also served as a tutor and thesis advisor to numerous students. In 1990, the Harvard Undergraduate Council voted to give him the Levenson Award for "outstanding teaching by a senior faculty member."
Marius also played a broader role in campus life. He coached the students charged with delivering annual commencement addresses each year and helped Harvard's presidents develop their graduation speeches. He also for years wrote the university's citations for the honorary degrees awarded to luminaries at commencement exercises. In 1993, Marius was awarded the Harvard Foundation Medal for his efforts to improve racial relations. He served as a faculty advisor to the Signet Society, a creative arts club, and he and his wife spent a semester during the 1996-97 academic year as acting masters of Adams House, an undergraduate residence hall.
Death
After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1998, Marius retired from teaching in order to focus on completing his final novel,
An Affair of Honor, amid the rigors of chemotherapy. He succeeded, turning in the final manuscript several months before he died in his home on November 5, 1999. His ashes were buried below Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, near the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott.