With great sadness, the Kenyon Review notes the untimely death of Robb Forman Dew, a distinguished writer of fiction and memoirs and the granddaughter of critic and poet John Crowe Ransom, the Review’s founding editor. A longtime member of the Review’s Advisory Board, a generous supporter of the magazine and its programs, and a devoted friend of its staff, Dew passed away on May 23, 2020, after a brief illness, at a hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on October 26, 1946, Dew was the first child of Dr. Duane Forman, a neurosurgeon, and Helen Ransom Forman, daughter of John Crowe Ransom and a talented, although largely unpublished, poet herself. Dew grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Dr. Forman practiced, but spent many summers in Gambier, Ohio, where her maternal grandfather taught at Kenyon College and edited the Kenyon Review.
Dew graduated from high school in Baton Rouge and briefly (a word she always emphasized) attended Louisiana State University. Her decision to leave LSU, though, was a fruitful one, because it was soon after that she met her future husband. She married Charles B. Dew, a young history professor, in 1967, and soon moved with him to Columbia, Missouri. In 1977, they relocated to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Charles Dew joined the faculty at Williams College and became the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History there.
Although a resident of Massachusetts for much of her adult life, Dew described herself as “deeply, gratefully, and inescapably Southern.” She came by her Southern-ness legitimately, with parents who were natives of the South and a grandfather who was a founding member of the Southern literary group known as the Fugitives. The rhythms of Southern speech remained with her throughout her life.
Dew was also born to a storytelling tradition, not just as a Southerner but also as a member of the Ransom family. Grandfather Ransom told memorable stories with such well-known poems as “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” and “The Equilibrists.” Her mother, Helen Forman, was regularly begged by friends and family members to tell stories, some of them remarkably ribald, they had already heard dozens of times.
Dew herself once said, “I’ve always felt that the only way we can define our history is through stories.” As a storyteller, she followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, her mother, and her godfather, novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren. Her native ability combined with her deep appreciation for language made her an elegant raconteur; an evening at her table was an experience to be treasured.
While Dew said she felt completely fulfilled as a wife and mother, she began in her thirties to write with a view toward publishing. Putting the old stories, and the new ones that proceeded from them, on paper, and then searching for the sense of them, led her to become a novelist. In the 1980s, she emerged as a member of a group of young women novelists, among them Louise Erdrich, Nancy Thayer, and Anne Tyler, who found camaraderie and friendship as they pursued their literary efforts.
Dew’s 1981 novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, won the National Book Award (then known as the American Book Award) for a first novel. That book, whose title was taken from graffiti inscribed on a bridge on a rural road, was one of several that drew upon the life and culture of small-town central Ohio. Her acclaimed trilogy—The Evidence Against Her (2001), The Truth of the Matter (2005), and Being Polite to Hitler (2011)—set in fictional Washburn, Ohio, was her crowning achievement.
In addition to her works of fiction, which also included The Time of Her Life (1984) and Fortunate Lives (1992), Dew published two nonfiction works. The first of these, A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings for a Manageable Feast (1992), became a fixture on many kitchen bookshelves. The second was The Family Heart, subtitled A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out, which earned critical raves and won an appreciative audience among the parents of gay men and women as well as those men and women themselves.
In 2007, Dew was awarded an honorary doctorate in letters from Kenyon. In the citation for the degree, Professor of English Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky declared, “[Y]ou are more like family than a guest in this place that has grown so fertile in your imagination.”
Dew is survived by her husband of more than fifty years; two sons, Charles “Steve” Dew of Williamstown and John “Jack” Dew of Latham, New York; a daughter-in-law, Emily K. Dew, of Latham; and a sister, Elizabeth Ransom Forman, of Gambier.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Young Writers Workshop of the Kenyon Review, a summer program on the College’s campus for aspiring writers, at Finn House, 102 West Wiggin Street, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio 43022-9623, or at Scholarship in Memory of Robb Forman Dew.
Read “All the Time” from the Winter 2009 issue of the Kenyon Review.