#samuel rogers

[macrolit]

Literary history that happened on 18 December

[ripplefactor]

Brighton is still very gay and full of balls.

Samuel Rogers, 1829 ..

[turnbullrarebooks]

30 July - On this day in 1763 the English poet Samuel Rogers was born.

Rogers was one of the most celebrated poets of his day and is perhaps best remembered for The pleasures of memory, about which Byron wrote: ‘His elegance is really wonderful - there is no such thing as a vulgar line in the book’.

Rogers’s reputation, however, was later eclipsed by his contemporaries. As Richard Garnett wrote in his entry on Rogers for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘His Augustan metrics and lucidity were valued less highly by Victorian readers than the mystery and darkness of those poets now called Romantic’.

The Alexander Turnbull Library holds a small collection of Rogers’s poetry, from first editions of An ode to superstition; with other poems (1786) and The pleasures of memory (1792) to collected editions published in 1827 and 1852, the latter inscribed and presented by Rogers to Caroline Phillips, daughter of the portrait painter Thomas Phillips.

[uwmadarchives]

Spooky UW Mystery Novel

This time of year, the University Archives often gets questions about haunted buildings on campus.  Most stories revolve around Science Hall, often stemming from the long tenure of the anatomy department in the upper reaches of the building..

Anatomy classroom in Science Hall.  

But another contributing factor to the myth of Science Hall was the now mostly forgotten mystery novel, Don’t Look Behind You, by Samuel Rogers. 

Rogers came to Wisconsin in 1919 as an instructor in English, but he switched to French in 1920 and remained as a French professor until his retirement in 1960 (he died in 1985).  In addition to his scholarly work on Balzac, he was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1950, he also wrote 6 novels and 3 mystery novels. His book Dusk at the Grove won the $10,000 Atlantic Monthly Novel Prize in 1934.

Samuel G. A. Rogers

The mysteries, Don’t Look Behind You (1944), You’ll Be Sorry (1945) and You Leave Me Cold (1946), are set in a Midwestern university town named “Woodside” that is obviously Madison.

At the end of Don’t Look Behind You, Daphne, a nursing student, is chased through the upper floors of Science Hall by her would be killer,  Rogers had taught in Science Hall early in his career and according to his oral history “I think I got the idea from thinking what a lugubrious place Science Hall was, and trying to write a story, the end of which would be someone being chased by a homicidal maniac up through the stairs of Science Hall, ending up in what used to be--I don't suppose it still is--the morgue.”

The book was read as part of Chapter A Day on WHA radio in the fall of 1944, and a version was broadcast as part of the first season of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, starring Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles.

Happy Halloween!

--David Null for the University Archives

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For more information about UW campus history, contact [email protected] or visit library.wisc.edu/archives. On, Wisconsin!

[strangeforeignbeauty]

Sam Rogers @ IMG Models

[whatcouldgowrong-ohthat]

"Look, I'm not my old man. I can't do this all day. So can we try the faster version where you just give up?"

[strangeforeignbeauty]

Sam Rogers @ IMG Models

[thenewobjective]

anthéne ~ Air Signs Inspired by a bird landing on a city windowsill, Air Signs by anthéne looks to the skies for meaning or assurance.... http://acloserlisten.com/2026/07/11/anthene-air-signs/

anthéne ~ Air Signs