I first met Richard Marius, as is appropriate for an editor, through his writing--specifically by working on his second novel, Bound for the Promised Land, which came my way in 1973. By the time I met Richard face to face several months later, I had already traveled from his fictional territory of Bourbon County in East Tennessee to California with as contentious and god-struck crew of gold rushers as anyone would ever want to know, and I was extremely curious about their author. I was not disappointed.

As anyone who ever met him knew, Richard was as much fun, as full of stories and energy, and exuberant good feelings as the oversized mythical characters who peopled his novels. And he was an editor's dream.

Richard was simply never as a loss for words. They poured out of him in a Southern accent but in cadences of the King James Bible, which had been read aloud to him as a child from cover to cover several times over, and with a delight in expression found in Shakespeare. Sometimes there were too many words. But he was never averse to cutting.

One of his favorite stories was about arriving at the Knopf offices with two bags full of the 2000 pages that were the first draft of his third novel, After the War, and dropping them off with a thud that reverberated throughout the entire building, flinging out his arms and saying "Here it is!" We lifted whole sections from books, one long enough to make a small novel by itself.

He was also never at a loss for a story. And these stories found their way into four novels, set over a hundred years in his ficitonal Bourbon County. The Coming of Rain, published in 1969, Bound for the Promised Land, in 1976, After the War in 1992, and now, his final novel, published on September 18, 2001, An Affair of Honor. Each of the novels is set against a historical event of major importance--the westward immigration, the aftermath of the Civil War, the dislocations of the First and Second World Wars. But these events happen to individual characters so rich and well-realized that they fairly leap of the page, folk he described in The Coming of Rain as "country people posessed of a rich, Biblical imagination." People who often took their origin from the local stories he published from high school onwards in his hometown Lenoir City News.

In the same way that his journalism and his own storytelling worked its way into the novels, and his historical training gave them weight, his novelistic ability helped make his biographies of two of the three great Reformation figures--Thomas More (1983) and Martin Luther (1994)--works of breathtaking readability along with their original and solid scholarship.

Writing novels and Reformation history was only part of Richard's life, the part I knew best, of course. But he had a whole other career in academia, having been a professor of Reformation History at the University of Tennessee and director of Expository Writing at Harvard from 1978 to 1998, when he retired. Over 30,000 freshmen had their first taste of college level writing in Marius's Expository Writing Program, the only required course at Harvard. He was immensely involved in the program, attending every section and always teaching one or more classes himself. Two books, A Writer's Companion and A Short Guide to Writing About History, grew out of these experiences. A popular, beloved teacher of Twain and Faulkner, he also, during summers, directed the Governor's academy for high school teachers of writing in Tennessee.

I and all who knew and loved him miss him, but it is a wonderful gift to have this last book he wrote, An Affair of Honor, finished only months before he died, the final book of his Bourbon County Trilogy.

--Ann Close