Willis E. McNelly

Willis Everett McNelly (December 16, 1920 – April 7, 2003) was an American literature professor and writer who authored The Dune Encyclopedia, the 1984 companion to Frank Herbert's Dune series of science fiction novels.

The son of an avid science fiction reader of the same name, McNelly grew up immersed in science fiction, which he later preferred to call "speculative fiction." Securing a doctorate in English literature from Northwestern University, McNelly later edited the first university-level textbooks on science fiction as literature in the mid-1960s, in particular Above the Human Landscape and Mars, We Love You, co-edited with his fellow teacher, Jane Hipolito.

An "internationally recognized scholar and authority on the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats," McNelly was "best known for his pioneering efforts to win acceptance of science fiction as a serious form of modern literature." Most of the over 5,000 science fiction books contained in the wing are from the combined collection of Willis Jr. and his father.

McNelly wrote the eulogy for close friend Frank Herbert in 1986;

McNelly died of cancer on April 7, 2003, at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California.