Volume 26, Number 19 · December 6, 1979
I. A. Richards (1893–1979)
By Harry Levin
When Ivor Richards was stricken with a terminal illness last spring, he was fulfilling a long, far-ranging, and exceptionally active career as a citizen of the world. During his eighty-seventh year he had been revisiting China, for him the beloved scene of educational ventures and recurrent interchanges many years before. Despite his failing strength, his lectures had been meeting with a triumphal reception. For five weeks he was treated with the utmost resources of Chinese medicine, and finally flown by the government with a medical escort back to Cambridge University, where he died in the bosom of alma mater on Friday, September 7. As a young student at Clifton and Cambridge he had been forced to drop out periodically by the hazard of tuberculosis, and in subsequently rebuilding his health had turned himself into an indefatigable mountaineer. It was on a mountain top that he met Dorothea Pilley, the accomplished alpinist who became his wife. Inseparable traveling companions, they spent most of their vacations in the Alps or in quest and conquest of more distant peaks. Even during their later years in New England, after Mrs. Richards had been seriously injured by a motor accident, they still went backpacking over the academic weekends.
Feature, 2290 words
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