Robert Palfrey Utter (1875–1936)

Robert Palfrey Utter, Professor of English, whose death occurred with tragic swiftness on the night of February 17, 1936, when he was struck down by a falling tree, was completing his sixteenth year of service to the University of California.

Mr. Utter was born in Olympia, Washington, on November 23, 1875, the son of the Rev. David Utter and Rebecca S. Palfrey Utter. He was educated in the public schools of Chicago, the Cambridge Latin School, and at Harvard University where, in 1898, he received the A.B. degree and, in 1906, the Ph.D. degree.

In 1907 he married, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Madeleine Bôcher, a daughter of Professor Ferdinand Bôcher of Harvard. Mrs. Utter died in Berkeley a few months after her husband. Their two children, Robert P. Utter, Jr., and Cicily Ann Utter, survive.

In his years at the University Professor Utter contributed richly and permanently to the lives of all who came into close touch with him. He was a ripe scholar; a man of letters, whose familiar essays are distinguished by grace of expression and shrewd insight; a teacher possessed of a stern conscience as well as a lively understanding of human nature; a companion whose geniality permeated any group about the fire, whether it blazed in the study or in a mountain camp. Robert Utter was no hermit: he delighted in good talk, and the activities of men always aroused his interest. He was a true lover of the world of nature, and as often as he could, with two or three chosen friends he sought the solitary places of forest and mountain.

The testimony to Professor Utter's lasting service to his kind will best be found in the influence he exerted over the many students who sat before him, from his earliest years at Harvard, later at Amherst, at the A.E.F. School at Beaune, and last at the University of California. It will be found too in the wit and wisdom of his essays, and in the pages of his last book, Pamela's Daughters, a study in the fashions in heroines, a work that reveals the author's gift for wholesome but gentle satire. This book was completed only a month before he died, and has recently been published.