Daniel Aaron, professor of American studies, dies

NEW YORK—Daniel Aaron, a founding scholar and ambassador of American studies who explored and explained his country through books, essays and diplomatic missions and helped preserve the literary canon as the first president of the Library of America, has died.

Aaron, who received a National Humanities Medal in 2010, died Saturday at age 103 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to his son, Paul Aaron. Daniel Aaron had been admitted a week earlier for breathing problems.

“He was active intellectually, right to the end,” Paul Aaron told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

He was a professor emeritus at Harvard University, where even at age 100 he worked daily in his office. But, unofficially, he was the foremost “Americanist,” a self-described “practitioner of things American.” A child of Russian immigrants, Aaron’s long life was a quest to learn the new world and share his knowledge. He traveled from Eastern Europe to South America and wrote such influential books as “Men of Good Hope,” profiles of left-wing writers and thinkers in the U.S.; and “The Unwritten War,” a critical review of Civil War literature and how writers confronted racial prejudice.

His most lasting contribution to American letters was likely the Library of America, established in 1979—through public and private grants—as an answer to France’s Pleiade series of elegant volumes of classic texts. The project was first suggested by critic Edmund Wilson in the early 1960s.

Aaron, editor Jason Epstein and others wanted to ensure that major American books and authors remained available, affordable and in worthy condition by publishing hardcover volumes with shiny black covers, acid-free paper and ribbons to keep place. Releasing a handful of books each year, the library now has more than 200 works, including writings by the founding fathers, 19th century standards by Herman Melville and Mark Twain and contemporary giants such as Philip Roth and John Ashbery.

In his memoir “The Americanist,” published in 2007, Aaron identified himself as a “father seeker, hungry for acceptance, eager to slough off his Jewish identity and to melt into the larger America.” Aaron’s citation upon receiving the Humanities medal praised him as “an Americanist of both mind and heart” and for “a career unhindered by academic and political boundaries.”

His other books included “Cincinnati, Queen City of the West” and “The United States,” a popular textbook co-authored with William Miller and Richard Hofstadter.