Ricardo J. Quinones, a long-time Claremont resident and retired comparative literature professor at Claremont McKenna College, has died from complications of a many-year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was the first president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (which formed in 1994).
Prof. Quinones was also founding director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at the college, which now has a distinguished lectureship in his name. For several years, he served on the board of directors of the National Council for the Humanities.
He died in hospice care at his home in West Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 2019. He was 83.
Prof. Quinones and his young family arrived in Claremont in an old Buick station wagon in 1963, straight out of Harvard University, where he earned his PhD under renowned literary scholar Harry Levin. Over the years he became a fixture on the small, growing campus, a beloved teacher for generations of students, in love with his subject. He was the school’s chosen professor of the year in 1977. He loved reading and literature and all kinds of stories, baseball and basketball, movies, especially gangster movies, and The Godfather above all. He was as delighted by Bird and Magic as he was by T.S. Eliot and King Lear. During the 1963 move to Claremont, he entertained his then-two young sons with the stories of Odysseus, and his office was a famous chaos of books and papers piled in seemingly incoherent stacks, in a filing system only he could decipher.
He retired from CMC in 2002, after 39 years on its faculty. In his long career, he wrote nine books of literary criticism, including three in retirement while battling Parkinson’s. He was a noted scholar and expert on the works of Shakespeare, Dante, and James Joyce. His last book, North/South: The Great European Divide, in 2016, was a discussion of Protestant and Catholic Christianity and their effect on economic development. His first book, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (1972), is considered a standard of literary studies of the period, discussing how the modern view of time as a commodity to be controlled came into being. Historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, in 1985, called it “one of the most important books of the last two decades.” Novelist Charles Johnson used Quinones’ book, The Changes of Cain, an exposition on the Cain-Abel theme in literature – the impulses in human nature of innocence and destruction — to influence his 1998 historical novel, Dreamer, about the life of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In retirement, he also wrote five books of poetry. At his last Christmas dinner, he read to his family For the Union Dead by poet Robert Lowell.
A public celebration of his life will be held at CMC, the date for which will be announced later.
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