Passing of Stephen B. Oates

[David Lockmiller]

https://artsfuse.org/235927/author-appre...n-b-oates/

The author was a former student.

I have a very strong memory of Oates lecturing. The Civil War course was taught in a large lecture hall with no windows; he always said he was glad for that because he wanted us to forget that we were in 20th-century Amherst and instead feel as though we were on a 19th-century battlefield. Delivered from the stage, his lectures were more like absolutely riveting one-man shows. Yet, like in his books, he always let the characters tell their own stories. He liked to talk in dialect so we had the sense we were sitting in an army camp with these people. You could almost hear cannons in the distance.

In one particular class, the war was over and it was clear that Lincoln’s assassination was going to be the last thing he taught us that day. Sure enough, as the president and Mrs. Lincoln were preparing to go to Ford’s Theatre, Oates told us, “Put down your pencils. You won’t forget this.” By the end of the lecture I was in tears. I literally couldn’t remove myself from my seat for several minutes. Only the noisy onslaught of students coming in for the next class roused me from my seat. As I walked outside, I felt a sense of shock as that rainy night in Washington, DC, morphed into a sunny day in Amherst, with cars instead of horses. No writer, historian, or filmmaker ever took me nearly as close to Lincoln, the man, as did Stephen B. Oates. I have always been indebted to him for that.