George Eric Core, scholar, editor and writer, died Oct. 14, 2023. He was 84.
Core was born in 1939 in Kansas City, Missouri. After he earned his bachelor’s and master’s from Vanderbilt, he served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. After his military service, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He taught literature at Chapel Hill, the University of Georgia, Davidson College, Vanderbilt, Emory University and the University of the South. Core was an active scholar and writer, publishing throughout his entire 48-year career as an editor.
He began his tenure as editor of The Sewanee Review, the oldest literary quarterly in America, in September 1973, after being senior editor at the University of Georgia Press. Under Core’s leadership, The Sewanee Review was regarded as one of the most carefully edited literary quarterlies in the country. He broadened its scope from being a primarily Southern-focused journal to one that encompassed regional, national and international writing. As an editor, he helped advance the careers of such writers as Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Shelby Foote, Patrick White, William Trevor, William Hoffman, William Styron, George Garrett, Louis D. Rubin, Wendell Berry, Sam Pickering and Roy Foster.
Additionally, he published articles and reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Southern Review and others. Core edited or co-edited seven books, primarily in the field of American literature. He served three times on juries for the Pulitzer Prize committee and was a founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Among the books he edited is The Critics Who Made Us: Essays from the Sewanee Review (University of Missouri, 1993) and, with H.L. Weatherby, Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations (University of Missouri, 2005).
He is survived by his wife, Susan Darnell Core, three children and a granddaughter.
