Kittery Point - Carl Dawson (b. May 2, 1938) died at home on April 7, 2019. His life was the stuff of fiction and two memoirs, November 1948 and Living Backwards , which told the story of his family's move from a council house in Yorkshire, England, to a bungalow on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  After a peripatetic childhood that took him to Toronto, Canada, and back to Yorkshire, he found both a home and a profession in books. He taught British literature at UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Delaware.

In addition to his memoirs and numerous articles, Carl authored or edited ten books, including studies of Matthew Arnold, Thomas Love Peacock, Lafcadio Hearn, English literature in 1850 ( Victorian Noon ), and British autobiographers ( Prophets of Past Time ). His last books were biographies of William Dean Howells and Mary Austin coauthored with his wife, Susan Goodman. His voice is perhaps best heard in his personal exploration of the workings of memory, which ultimately failed him: "To resurrect fragments of time across all those years is to live in the world of my parents . . . It is to dance in dreams with Maureen O'Hara or to watch my father stride away to find a lost ball. Memories endure as nothing else can, focusing the past and sustaining the present. They endure with the intensity of joy, or bitter loss, or shame, or the smell of sawdust on a Utah ranch, or the gesture of beautiful girl in the Calverley Woods, or the conviction that ghosts escaped that woods one moonlit autumn evening and warned me not to forget what I could not bear to remember."

Carl was a modest man, who never spoke of the numerous awards he received, among them an Andrew W. Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, NEH, Huntington, Fulbright, and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He loved Classical music and bluegrass, Persian rugs, portraiture and landscapes. His passion was words, their sound, rhythm, order, play; and it was a cruel irony that as his illness progressed he lost the art to summon them. Above all, he loved his children from his first marriage, Sarah and Geoffrey Dawson, and his wife, Susan. He took great pleasure in his granddaughter Julia, his nephew, Kirk Dawson, and brother, Walt Dawson, and his wife, Sarah. In a sense, life came full circle for him. After his father lost his memories of life in Yorkshire, and consequently a part of himself, Carl preserved them in memoir. Friends and family do not need to write books to remember Carl; he lives in our stories, our memories, our hearts, and we are grateful for the many ways he enriched our lives.

Care for the Dawson family has been entrusted to the JS Pelkey & Son Funeral Home. To leave online condolences please visit www.jspelkeyfuneralhome.com .