Beloved and long-time Maryville College English professor Dr. Charlotte Beck passes away
April 13, 2024
Dr. Charlotte Beck, an English professor at Maryville College for more than three decades, passed away on March 27 in Hilton Head, South Carolina. She was 86.
Born Charlotte Ann Hudgens Beck in Gallatin, Tennessee, to the late James and Mary Hudgens, she joined the Maryville College faculty in 1967 and worked in a number of capacities until her retirement in 2001, at which time she was named professor emerita.
“Charlotte Beck was concluding her career at the College just when I was beginning mine,” said Dr. Dan Klingensmith, vice president and dean of the College. She was hilarious, irreverent and sometimes formidable, but deeply dedicated to students and to the craft of studying and teaching literature. She was a pillar of the Maryville College faculty for many years, and we mourn her passing.”
In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by her husband, Dr. Raymond Warren Beck, whom she met when both sang in the choir at Church Street United Methodist Church in Knoxville, where she moved to attend the University of Tennessee. After obtaining a bachelor’s in music in 1959, she pursued both a master’s and Ph.D. at UT, completing the latter in 1972.
According to her obituary, Beck “spent her career years teaching, leading student trips, researching, writing books and publishing scholarly articles while working at Maryville College … as a professor and, when asked, as chair of the [Division] of Languages and Literature. Charlotte published extensively on Southern writers, especially Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren. Her book, ‘Worlds and Lives: The Poetry of Randall Jarrell,’ was published in 1984 by Associated Faculty Press; ‘The Fugitive Legacy, A Literary History’ was published in 2001 by LSU Press; and ‘Robert Penn Warren, Critic’ published by The University of Tennessee Press in 2007. A former president of the Robert Penn Warren Circle, she edited the Fall 1994-95 Warren issue of The Mississippi Quarterly.”
“Charlotte was a gracious Southern lady who did good scholarship on American literature, especially the Fugitive Poets of the American South, and who gave kind attention to the needs of her students, no matter where they found themselves in their intellectual journey,” said Dr. Sam Overstreet, professor of English and the current chair of the Division of Languages and Literature at Maryville College who began his own MC career in 1990.
In retirement, the Becks moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort as an adjunct professor of English, singing in her spare time with the Hilton Head Choral Society, the Hilton Head Symphony Chorus and Hilton Head’s St. Luke’s Church. In her spare time, she enjoyed traveling, opera and symphony events and, of course, literature.
Survivors include her sons, Warren and Andrew, and three grandchildren. In lieu of flowers or donations, the family requests that friends and acquaintances “please text someone you love and tell them how important they are to you.”
