UGA'S Pulitzer Prize Winner Professor of Ideas
His mind works overtime, although he can't quite comprehend his newfound fame.

Athens. The average age in this cramped classroom in Leconte Hall is probably about 19. The 15 University of Georgia honors undergraduates discussing life in Colonial America are whipsaw smart, their observations frequently as fresh and as vividly drawn as the yellow highlighter markings in their opened textbooks.

And yet even with all this youthful exuberance, no one seems more alive in here than Benjamin Franklin. Could it be because the teacher recent Pulitzer Prizewinning UGA professor Edward J. Larson keeps popping in and out of his chair, flipping through the pages of Franklin's writings as if flicking aside whole decades, breathing life into 200yearold words?

Right there, there's Franklin's entrepreneurial chutzpah. His illegitimate son. Even, God help us, the way he used chess to learn a
foreign language.

"Can you imagine going to a football game with this guy?!" Larson practically yelps. "What do you think that would be like?"

The students dissolve in laughter, including sophomore Jennifer Westbrook, who will later confide, "He's like this every day. He's just really exciting." Not to mention right on point: Suddenly, Ben Franklin doesn't seem quite so foreign here in Bulldog territory.

"See, we can relate to Ben Franklin, even though he's beyond most of us," Larson sums up. "Well, he's beyond me!"

Well, let's not be so hasty. Admittedly, Larson isn't quite on a par with the Philadelphia statesman who dreamed up bifocals and the public library whenever he wasn't busy writing the Declaration of Independence. But give Larson some time. At 44, the Ohio native already boasts four advanced degrees, three published books and in this age of overcrowded academic institutions two separate offices on the UGA campus, reflecting his joint appointment in the history department and law school.

And now, that Pulitzer Prize for history. It was almost two weeks ago that Larson won what is arguably America's highest writing honor and indisputably a first for a member of the UGA faculty. And if "Summer for the Gods," Larson's book about the infamous Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Dayton, Tenn., isn't an invention of Franklinesque proportions, it has been almost uniformly hailed for the highly original way its author approached writing about the epic 1925 battle over teaching evolution in public schools. Unlike previous Scopes works "Inherit the Wind," for one that clearly came down either on the side of creationists or evolutionists, Larson's is remarkably evenhanded. Especially when you consider that Scopes' defense attorney was Clarence Darrow, whom Larson's father idolized.

"Clarence Darrow was my father's hero. He modeled his life after him," Larson said in an interview after teaching his two-hour history class last week. "They were both from small Ohio towns, they both taught school in Ashtabula, Ohio, and they both went to the University of Michigan Law School."

His newfound fame feels somewhat unreal to Larson, whose book budget was small enough, he convinced William Jennings Bryan College to let him use its trial archive photos for free.

"I had seen an advance copy and it was looking pretty good," said Richard Cornelius, English department head at the small fundamentalist college in Dayton founded in honor of the renowned orator who helped prosecute Scopes. "So now we're very glad that we helped him!"

Even more unreal, Larson, who never went to any of his own graduations not from Harvard Law School or the University of Wisconsin's PhD program suddenly found himself agreeing to be UGA's commencement speaker in June. And whowas that fellow discussing Social Darwinism on PBS's nervewrackingly nerdy "Newshour" last week?

"I find going on live national TV terrifying," Larson "In a way, I'm looking forward to these several weeks of life being over." In a way, though, even he admits it's been kind of fun. Consider the scene in Hillsdale, Mich., where Larson actually learned of his win. He'd agreed months earlier to lecture at little Hillsdale College because it was his mother's alma mater (she'd planned to attend, but died last November), the place where his grandparents had met ("I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Hillsdale," Larson told his wildly appreciative audience the next day) and now either weirdly or wonderfully, depending upon your perspective where he walked into the small campus hotel to confront a handful of grinning, notepaperclutching employees. " They said, 'Mr. Larson, we have some messages for you!'," he recalled delightedly.

If you're thinking Larson should have been hanging around UGA, waiting for the call that all potential Pulitzer winners know comes right around 3 p.m., forget it. It's not just that Larson was determined to honor his prior commitment to Hillsdale. Nor even the fact that he'd pretty much given up on winning a few weeks earlier when, after a friend of a friend had let slip that the Pulitzer committee had "liked" his book, he'd called his publishers.

"They basically said, 'We haven't heard anything, you're not a finalist'," recalled Larson, adding with a rueful grin, "I felt a little stupid."

No, it's this whole thing Larson has about not trying to plot things out too far ahead of time. Except for when he was 5 years old and someone asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he responded he swears it's true "a college professor in a college town," it's the way he's always been.

"I'm not an intricate planner," said Larson, who made it to this particular college town in 1987 with stops along the way as an analyst for Wisconsin's state senate, an attorney with Seattle's largest firm and even a freelance writer of newspaper travel stories. "I take one year at a time. If you plan more than a year ahead, you cut off a lot of your options." Case in point: "Summer for the Gods." Larson had already written about the Scopes trial, albeit briefly, in an earlier book, "Trial and Error." But as he frequently found himself discussing the trial and as a wealth of additional research materials became available, he decided four years ago to switch gears from another history of scienceoriented book he was researching.

"Both Darrow and Bryan were able to talk about ideas and to get people thinking," Larson said almost wonderingly about the two men who were, respectively, the country's most famed criminal lawyer and a revered former presidential candidate. "You think about what makes a great trial and you automatically think of a juicy murder case. But here were the country's two greatest living orators, talking about ideas."

Ideas and words clearly fascinate Larson, who gives them all the time and attention they deserve. UGA history department chairman David Roberts says Larson writes "amazingly fast." Not true, sighs Larson, who claims to sometimes spends an entire day crafting one page or even a singlesentence. Sometimes, apparently, a little more than a day.

"Several times I woke up in the middle of the night and he would be up," Larson's wife, Lucy, recalled about the year "Summer" was being written.

"I'd say, 'What's wrong?' And he'd say, 'Nothing. I just thought of something and if I don't write it down now, I know I'll forget it'." A pediatrician and mother of two toddlers (Sarah is 3 and Luke is 15 months), Lucy Larson obviously is skilled at juggling numerous demands herself. But even she marvels at her husband's ability to move seemingly effortlessly between teaching in two schools (At the law school, Larson teaches health care law), book research, and writing for law reviews and other scholarly journals (Coming soon: "John Mitchell" in American National Biography). And doing it on two different coasts. For years, the Larsons have lived both in Athens and Washington state, where they met about 12 years ago and where Lucy Larson practiced medicine.Through careful scheduling of both their careers, they've managed to spend little extended time apart during their 7year marriage, although Lucy Larson recently resigned from her Washington job, saying things had gotten "too complicated" now that they have children. During summers off from teaching, Ed would play "househusband" in Washington while also doing research and writing, Lucy Larson said.

"He enjoys variety and that's sort of the driving force behind everything he does," she explained. "Doing one thing sort of replenishes his desire to do the other." One doesn't so much interview Ed Larson as participate in a delightfully freeflowing exhange of words and ideas on subjects ranging from travel (he's been to Tibet and to Dayton) to movies and books.

"My favorite actor was Jimmy Stewart and my favorite writer was Graham Greene and now they're both dead," moaned Larson, who quickly perked up again when he remembered Pat Conroy was still around. Ask about possible modern-day parallels to the Scopes controversy and Larson is every inch the serious academic.

"Today, someone like Bryan would argue that if the majority wants to restrict pornography on the Internet, they have that right," said Larson. "Majoritarian thinking versus individual liberty is an eternal struggle in America."

Yet ask him about next month's Pulitzer ceremony at Columbia University in New York and suddenly he's as excited as a guy going to a Dawgs game with Ben Franklin.

"I'll get to meet Katharine Graham!" Larson went practically pieeyed at the mere thought of talking with the longtime Washington Post publisher and this year's Pulitzer laureate for biography. All "Summer for the Gods" is, meanwhile, is words and ideas. Indeed, praise has been heaped upon the book for the way it clearly lays out the thinking on all sides of the evolution controversy. "I think in the past people had told the Bryan side or the Darrow side, but no one had told them both," said Larson, who in the interest of remaining unbiased will only say he's against laws restricting the teaching of evolution in schools. "I didn't have an agenda. I just wanted everybody to hear both sides fairly and then I didn't care what side (readers) came down on."

And how better than to hear it in their own voices? "Summer" is rich in the original words of both key and bit players in the Scopes Trial, in part because Larson had access to new resources like the ACLU's archives, but also because it kept him "fixed to" the story as it really unfolded.

"I love words," Larson explained. "I love to use quotes because it captures the time and the feeling better than I ever could." Or as he'd told his history class a few hours earlier: "I don't know a better way to do it, than to read about the way someone wrote about it who was there."

Larson's students say he didn't mention his Pulitzer win, which they all found out about by reading the campus newspaper. In that instant, several said, things changed a little.

"Oh yeah, I'm about to work on my essay (for Larson's class) and then I start thinking,'I'm writing this for the only person here who's ever won a Pulitzer'," recalled Westbrook, an early childhood education major.

To Larson, his students "already knew the emperor had no clothes" when the award was announced midterm. "Now I can see some of them looking at me quizzically, like, 'Should we try to put the clothes back on him?!'"

Nor are his students alone in trying to fit Ed Larson in with his newfound fame. Several professors interviewed said they worried about bigname univesities trying to hire him away.

"I think our biggest concern is, will he stay?" said chemistry professor Henry Schaefer. "Although UGA has come way up in the rankings, it's probably at best No. 25. And I can't imagine those 24 others aren't interested in getting Ed Larson."

Larson seems slightly uncomfortable discussing the subject. "Athens is a wonderful town, the university gets a nice diversity of students and I really believe in public education," he said slowly. "So I'm not making any other plans. Let's just leave it at that." Just one more thing.

"I forgot to tell you I'm a huge baseball fan!" a chargined Larson calls the next day. "My Walter Mitty dream is to throw out the opening pitch in a BravesReds game. Maybe that could happen some day!"

After all, it never hurts to plan ahead.

EDWARD J. LARSON
Age: 44.
Education: J.D., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D. in the history of science, University of Wisconsin; B.A., Williams College Profession: Professor, University of Georgia; joint appointment in law and history. Recent honor: Won 1998 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Basic Books,1997). He is the first person to win a Pulitzer as a member of the UGA faculty. Personal: Married to Lucy Larson, a pediatrician. Two children: Sarah, 3, and Luke, 15 months What's next: He's back doing research on his pre-Summer project, a book about the history of the Galapagos Islands. It's sort of a history of how one place has influenced our view of biology and geology.

Copyright 1998 Jill Vejnoska. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

This data file may be reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial use.
A return link to the Access Research Network web site would be appreciated.

Page development by Premier Publications
for Access Research Network,
Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.

5.7.98