Marshall W. Fishwick (1923–2006)

Marshall William Fishwick was born in Roanoke on July 5, 1923, to English parents. He grew up singing in church with his brother John, who eventually became president of the Norfolk and Western Railway. He financed his studies at the University of Virginia (BA, 1943) by singing professionally. While serving with the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet during World War II (1939–1945), he wrote poetry, and in 1945 a collected volume of his poems, The Face of Jang, was published.

Fishwick returned to school after the war—University of Wisconsin (MA, 1946) and Yale University (PhD, 1949)—and published his dissertation as Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion (1959). Other early publications on Virginia history included Virginians on Olympus (1951), General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley (1954), Gentlemen of Virginia (1961), and Lee after the War (1963). He also wrote many books on popular culture: The Hero: American Style (1969), Common Culture and the Great Tradition: The Case for Renewal (1982), Seven Pillars of Popular Culture (1985), and Great Awakenings: Popular Religion in America (1995).

Fishwick taught at Washington and Lee University (1949–1962) before directing the Wemyss Foundation (1962–1964) and Lincoln University’s Art and American Studies departments (1964–1970), and then teaching at Temple University (1970–1976). Settling at Virginia Tech until his 2003 retirement, he founded the American Studies and Popular Culture programs. Among his well-known students were journalist Roger Mudd and novelist Tom Wolfe, who wrote forewords for some of Fishwick’s books.

Fishwick’s professional recognitions include honorary degrees from the University of Bombay (now the Univeristy of Mumbai), the University of Dhaka, and Krakow University. With eight Fulbright Awards and several other grants, he taught in Bangladesh, Denmark, Germany, India, Italy, South Korea, Poland, and Russia. He described some of his travels in Around the World in Forty Years (1984).

The Popular Culture Association, of which he had once served as president, named a travel grant program for Fishwick, and in 1997 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Popular Culture from the American Culture Association. He was an advisory editor for the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of American Culture and also edited works on communication, education, history, literature, and theology. In his religious life, he served as a member of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church and historiographer of the Diocese of Southwest Virginia.

Fishwick had three daughters and a son with his first wife, two stepdaughters, and thirteen grandchildren. His third wife was historian Ann La Berge, a Virginia Tech colleague he married in 1995. He died at their Blacksburg home of complications from a blood disease on May 22, 2006. Fishwick’s last book, Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture (2007), was published posthumously and includes several recollections about Fishwick from people who knew him personally and professionally.