Year Inducted: 1990
Natalie Calderwood rose to full professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas without a PhD. The playwright William Inge had been one of her students. She was an innovative teacher, creatively interested in literature and enormously kind, but she also insisted upon the highest intellectual standards. An award was established in 1940 named after her. She was president of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and co-wrote Write Now, a textbook used for freshman composition courses. She wrote an average of one book review a week for the Kansas City Star. In 1966 she was granted the prestigious Jayhawker Hillteacher Award. She was instrumental in developing the Literature for Children course. She was a consistent and unfailing person of composure, compassion, skill, and dedication. Though all of those whose lives she touched were in her debt, it would be fair to say her example and counsel were especially valuable to women. She was a feminist before the contemporary movement got started and was (in her quiet way) indefatigable in challenging the chauvinist assumptions of her male colleagues. Her colleagues thought enough of her to nominate her for the Women's Hall of Fame two decades after her death. One of her close friends, Geraldine Hammond, recollected in a poem, "She moved through rooms of life, blessed, without touching, all who, privileged, her her quiet litany. Her wholeness and her firm sweet strength of being softened edges, curved the world into a sphere of grace."
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The University of Kansas Medical Center