Margery M. Sabin, Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English, is the author of the February 19-25 Person of the Week essay, which was written as an obituary. When Ms. Sabin joined the English Department, Mr. Garis was an "impressive and somewhat daunting senior colleague." He became a close friend during the more than thirty years they shared at Wellesley.

Robert E. Garis, Katharine Lee Bates Professor of English emeritus at Wellesley College and noted critic of dance, literature, music, and film, died January 26, 2001 at his home in Cambridge, Mass., after a long illness. He was 75.

Mr. Garis was best known in recent years for his ballet criticism, published in a variety of journals, starting in the 1960s, and culminating in his book, Following Balanchine, (1995), completed with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this impassioned meditation on George Balanchine's career, which he admired as one of the great creative achievements of 20th century art, Mr. Garis both enacted and explained his commitment to direct and genuine engagement with particular works of art as itself a creative and joyous experience. In writing notable for transposing analytic rigor into an informal and intimate voice, Mr. Garis's criticism draws readers into subtle, complex, and exact observations and judgments of the extraordinarily diverse art and artists he admired in music, literature, film, and ballet: Jane Austen, Dickens, Ibsen as well as Shakespeare, the dancing of Suzanne Farrell and Violette Verdy, together with the choreography of Balanchine; the films of Orson Welles, Preston Sturges, Marcel Ophuls, and Frederick Wiseman.

Mr. Garis was born in Hawley, Pa. in 1925, attended public schools in Allentown, Pa., and received his B.A. from Muhlenberg College in 1945. In 1956, he received his Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard University, after a decade which included a year as a Fulbright Scholar in England, teaching fellowships at Harvard, and five years of writing a monthly column of record-notes for The Nation.

Residential fellowships at the Yaddo Institute in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in the late 1950s and 1960s recognized and supported his emerging reputation as a critic. In the 1960s, Mr. Garis became a reviewer of fiction and literary criticism for The Hudson Review, contributed film criticism to Commentary and ballet criticism to Partisan Review. His first book, The Dickens Theater (1965), was a landmark in Dickens criticism. Never reluctant to defend his strongly felt judgments, Mr. Garis challenged other critics, friends, and students to be true to their direct experiences of art in order to locate particular and diverse kinds of vitality.

Mr. Garis's rigor and passion as a critic contributed to his charisma as a professor. He began teaching at Wellesley in 1951 and, at different times, served as Chair of the English Department and as Dean of the College. He retired from Wellesley in 1994. Several generations of devoted students, along with colleagues and friends, testify to the life-changing influence of his teaching on their eyes, ears, and minds. One former student recalls, "We learned to read by listening to his voice. When he read from Shakespeare or Ulysses, the passage became totally alive and present to us, and even when the material was very complex (as it almost always was), we felt in touch with it through him."

At the time of his illness, Mr. Garis was at work on a book length account of Orson Welles' career, portions of which were published in Raritan Quarterly.

A memorial gathering for colleagues from the staff and faculty as well as friends and former students is planned for Saturday afternoon, March 31, 2001 at 3:00 in Jewett Auditorium; reception to follow.