Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Bertram Wyatt-Brown (March 19, 1932 – November 5, 2012) was a noted historian of the Southern United States. He was the Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he taught from 1983 to 2004; he also taught at Case Western University for nearly two decades. He studied the role of honor in southern society, in all classes, and wrote a family study of the Percy family, including twentieth-century authors William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy.

Early life and education Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Wyatt-Brown was the son of Laura H. and Hunter Wyatt-Brown, an Episcopal priest who became a bishop. In 1983 Wyatt-Brown was a history finalist for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his best-known work, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), described as a study of the "meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites -- both slaveholders and non-slaveholders -- applied it to their lives."

Personal life and death In 1962 he married Anne Jewett Marbury, whom he met at Johns Hopkins. They had two daughters, Laura and Natalie.

Wyatt-Brown died on November 5, 2012.

Works Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery, Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969. The American People in the Antebellum South, (editor) West Haven, CT: Pendulum Press, 1973. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, New York: Oxford U Press, 1982. Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U Press, 1985. Honor and Violence in the Old South, New York: Oxford U Press, 1986. An abridged version of the author's Southern Honor. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family, New York: Oxford U Press, 1994. The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination, Athens: U of Georgia Press, 1994. The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2001. Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U Press, 2003. Virginia's Civil War, (editor with Peter Wallenstein) Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2004. A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America and Abroad, Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2014.