Russel B. Nye; Teacher and Biographer Won Pulitzer Prize

Russel B. Nye, 80, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, teacher and biographer who headed the English department at Michigan State University for nearly half the 39 years he taught there. He was a student of cultural trends whose scholarship ranged from jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke to the Battle of Gettysburg. He also was an avid reader of comic strips and a student of such TV series as “Gunsmoke.” He wrote more than a dozen books and won the Pulitzer in 1945 for “George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel,” a biography of the man who wrote a 10-volume history of the United States in the mid-19th Century. Nye’s other books included “The Popular Arts in America,” “Society and Culture in America” and “A History of the United States.” On Thursday in Lansing, Mich., of complications after a fall.