photo by: Richard Gwin

Kansas University English professor Jim Carothers, an expert on Faulkner and Hemingway, reflects on his 46-year teaching career at the university after retiring at the end of the most recent semester.

Among English professor Jim Carothers’ contributions over 46 years of teaching at Kansas University: Countless Jayhawks can spell Yoknapatawpha.

Quizzing students until they could correctly spell the mythical Mississippi county that is the setting for 14 of William Faulkner’s novels was part of Carothers’ curriculum for his Faulkner and Hemingway class.

Carothers retired from KU at the conclusion of the spring semester. He jokes that he’s ready to leave required meetings and paper-grading behind, he plans to continue sharing Yoknapatawpha County to future readers in a new way.

Carothers, since 2011, is one of the Faulkner experts on the team creating the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, an effort by scholars to build an encyclopedia of all the Yoknapatawpha novels’ characters and digitally map the invented county — inconsistencies between books included. He said the tool is hoped to be useful for scholars, teachers, students and independent readers of Faulkner alike.

“What we’re doing will go to anybody, anywhere for free as long as they have the Internet,” Carothers said. “I like the principle of this. This is sharing information on a very broad screen.”

American modernism — he called that Faulkner and Hemingway class his “signature course,” adding “I love to see the two of them side-by-side” — is Carothers’ area of expertise, especially short stories.

He discovered Hemingway at 15; after reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” from his parents’ collection, he sought out more Hemingway at the library and “read all the way down the shelf.”

“The story just about blew me away,” he said. “I didn’t know you could write about things such as those… as clearly and honestly as Hemingway was doing.”

A native of St. Louis, Carothers got his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri, where, he recalls, Faulkner hooked him while prepping for a final his sophomore year.

“I read three Faulkner novels in five days, and it changed my life,” Carothers said. “I found a world there that was real.”

Carothers went on to teach English at a few Missouri colleges before completing his doctorate at the University of Virginia. His first full-time job after that, which he started in the fall of 1970, was at KU.

Carothers said one of the things he’s appreciated most about teaching at KU is that — while he published two books on Faulkner and co-founded “The Faulkner Journal” — he wasn’t pigeonholed into teaching just that.

He was able to incorporate personal passions, most notably baseball, into his teaching as well. Carothers may be most famous for his popular course on baseball in literature (the sport is prominent in the work of Hemingway and Faulker, of course), which he taught off and on since 1974 and at times attracted classes of more than 150.

Carothers said he also loved teaching Shakespeare, as well as freshmen.

“I taught enough freshman English to have a degree in it. I liked it,” he said. “They’re fresh, as the word says, and they come in with lots of ambitions and impressions and ideas and notions.”

Carothers’ KU experience also has been more varied than just teaching.

He’s been active in faculty governance at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as the university level. He’s also been an administrator, including associate dean for humanities in CLAS from 1986 to 1997, acting director of the University Honors Program in 1995 to 1996 and interim associate provost for academic services from 2001 to 2003.

“Generations of KU students, however, know and remember Jim Carothers best as a teacher and mentor,” KU English department colleague Robert Elliott wrote for a recent event honoring Carothers. “Many encountered him first as a genial commentator and instructor at Traditions Night during orientation week. Others came to know and appreciate him as a professor in an astonishing variety of English courses, some of which he pioneered.”

Outside of academia, Carothers and his wife, Beverly, also built a life alongside Carothers’ 46 years at KU.

Carothers recalls one of his favorite stories from home, which also illustrates why he loves teaching English.

One evening when their daughter was small, Carothers and his wife found her in the living room, all her dolls out on the floor. She’d given each of them a pad of paper and a pencil. She was sitting up front in a chair teaching them to write, with the key instruction: “I know Daddy likes lot of ‘zamples.”

So true, Carothers said.

“In literature as well as other writing, you’ve got to have examples,” he said. “They’ve got to be clear, and they’ve got to be telling.”

The Carothers raised their children, seen grandchildren graduate college, watched many sunsets over Clinton Lake, and have seen the campus transform from season to season many times during Carothers’ tenure at KU, Beverly Carothers said, in a reflection she wrote this month during her husband’s final KU Commencement as a faculty member.

“I’m filled with so many memories, so many milestones, so many events for our 46 years here. My emotions fill my soul, tears of joy, sadness, how quickly these years rolled by,” she said. “What a good life.”