Bio:A. Grove Day

Arthur Grove Day was born in Philadelphia in 1904 and earned his bachelor's and graduate degrees from Stanford University, where he was friends with John Steinbeck. He moved to Hawaii in 1944, where he became a professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in the English department. He died in 1994, just shy of age 90, when he fell from his apartment. Upon his death, the Honolulu Advertiser referred to him in an editorial as "Hawaii's Literary Lion", and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin described him, in a front page piece, as "a towering literary figure... who brought to life the colorful history of Hawaii and other Pacific islands."

A prolific author and Hawaii historian, he wrote or edited more than 50 books. His most famous writings were "Mad About Islands: Of a Vanished Pacific," a collection of biographical essays on Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and other famous writers who spent time in the islands, and "Rascals in Paradise," a series of true stories on rogues in the Pacific that was co-written with James Michener. Day's books are still local best sellers, including "Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii" and "Best South Seas Stories."

At the University of Hawaii-Manoa, he taught a course in "Literature of the Pacific" from the late 1940's until his retirement. He chaired the English department from 1948-1953, and was the founding editor of "Pacific Science: A Quarterly Devoted to the Biological and Physical Sciences of the Pacific Region", established in 1947. In 1979, he won the Hawaii Award for Literature. For much of his life he was considered the definitive authority on the history of Hawaii. More recent criticism of him views him "as a centric figure for an Americanist Pacific Orientalism that resembles [Edward] Said's Orientalism."

"Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day", by Paul Lyons, in Boundary 2, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 47-78.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin News, Oct. 20, 1999.

Online edition of Pacific Science, Jan. 1947. Also Wikipedia's article on "Pacific Science".