Lasting Memories

Thomas Colborn Moser
Nov. 22, 1923-June 3, 2016
Stanford, California

Thomas C. Moser, Professor of English, noted scholar of the works of Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, and chair of the Department of English at Stanford University from 1963 to 1968, died June 3 at his home on the Stanford campus from complications of pneumonia.

Prof. Moser's publications include two important works of literary criticism and psychological biography, "Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline" (Harvard, 1957) and "The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford" (Princeton, 1980), as well as editions of Conrad's "Lord Jim," Ford's "The Good Soldier" and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." He received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1963 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1979.

Prof. Moser was born in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the only child of Oliver Perry Moser and Anna Mary Colborn. The family moved to Pittsburg during the Great Depression where Prof. Moser's father worked as a clerk for the B&O Railroad. After graduation from Dormont High School and a year studying engineering at the University of Pittsburg, Prof. Moser was drafted into the army and served three years as an electrical engineer, first in Europe and later in the Philippines and Japan.

Following the war, he attended Harvard University on the G.I. bill, graduating with an A.B. (mcl) in English in 1948. He completed his Ph.D. in the same discipline in 1955 and taught briefly at Wellesley College before taking a position at Stanford University in 1956. He married Mary Churchill Small, a dean at Radcliffe College, in 1952. As chair, Prof. Moser led the English Department through years of student unrest in the 1960s and revitalized the department, including the hiring of women faculty. At Stanford, he was a beloved and admired colleague and friend and a popular and inspiring teacher who often conducted seminars in his own home and was famous for inviting lonely undergraduates to Thanksgiving dinner. He also served as a powerful advocate for Stanford's innovative European campuses. Stanford Prof. Emeritus of English Albert Gelpi said of his colleague, "All who knew him came to trust and rely on his unfailing loyalty and honesty, his deeply caring heart, his compassionate understanding."

After the death of his first wife, Prof. Moser married Joyce Penn, in 1986, a scholar, attorney and teacher of American Literature, now a Stanford administrator in the Introductory Studies Program. He retired in 1992 and was Professor Emeritus at the time of his death. In addition to his wife Joyce of 30 years, Prof. Moser leaves two children by his first marriage, Thomas C. Moser Jr., of Ellicott City, Maryland, and Fredrika Churchill Moser, of Garrett Park, Maryland, and three grandchildren, Lucy Murnane, Polly Moser and Toby Moser.