PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAPHNE ATHAS
Opposite page:
Athas, left, with her
mother and sisters,
leaving New England
for Chapel Hill in
October 1938; P.C.
Athas, 1940s.
At left: Roasting the
Thanksgiving turkey
in “the shack,”
1940s. From left,
Walter Francis, sister
Thalia’s future husband; Daphne;
Thalia; sister Rachel.
Mrs. Athas kneels at
the oven. Thalia and
Rachel would
become teachers,
and brother Homer a
businessman in
Morehead City.
Below: Friends Jack
’ 47 and Gurney
Campbell ’ 45 see
Athas off on the
Queen Mary for
seven years in
Europe.
too much interested in Paris. I was not a
fan of Hemingway at the time and all the
’20s thing — I was brought up on the 19th
century British authors and the Russians.”
Athas supported herself by running service clubs for American GIs in England. The
money was good — and eventually more
came in from Fourth World — and she kept
a tiny room in London for weekends.
“It was more of the same cold, stoic
type of life, but in a totally new setting. I’m
still stoic. I don’t like to be cold.”
She occasionally popped over to Paris,
where she and a college friend, Gurney
Campbell ’ 46 (whose dorm room she had
commandeered during that Christmas
vacation), collaborated on a play that made
it to the U.S. stage.
Her father visited, and he enticed her to
his tiny village in Greece. She still summers
there.
UNC writing program, and Smith the
author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who
had moved to Chapel Hill in 1936.
All of them had mentored her, and after
Rehder died in 1967, Max Steele took over
and hired Doris Betts ’ 54 and then Athas. By
the mid-1970s, when Gingher joined the program, creative writing was still a low-key, low-interest discipline in a department where, in
Gingher’s words,“the only way to be taken
seriously as a writer was to be dead.”
Gingher, who recently directed the writing program but had come timidly to the
department, recalled,“She was funny and
The permanent lecturer
By the mid-1950s, Athas’ writing had
been noticed, favorably, by the likes of Paul
Green ’ 21, Jessie Rehder and Betty Smith
— Green the iconic Chapel Hill playwright, Rehder the first director of the
irreverent and goofy, so different from, I don’t
know, all the pontificators of the time. The
faculty was so lofty, male-dominated. They
were in a stratosphere that Daphne wasn’t.
She sort of took me under her wing.”
Now the program has about 13 faculty
plus occasional part-timers, and it’s an English minor. Athas was asked once to direct it
and quite predictably said no. Most 41-year
veterans of her distinction would have been
basking in tenure for years by now, but she
has steadfastly remained academically aloof.
By choice she is still a lecturer — “fixed-
term faculty” is the title — with the free-
dom to take breaks such as the
year in Tehran on a Fulbright
and the National Endowment
for the Arts year in Greece (and
the freedom to buy all her own
health and retirement benefits
in the open market).
As with her disinterest in
advanced degrees — “the institutionalization of it didn’t
appeal to me” — she has no
regrets.“I chose never to get in
it [tenure] because by that time
you have a certain amount of
