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Home > May/June 2008 > In Memoriam

May/June 2008

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In Memoriam

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May/June 2008

KENNEDY: Raymond Kennedy, who taught fiction writing at the College and GS for nearly 25 years, died on February 18, 2008, in Brooklyn. He was 73.

A novelist whose work drew high praise from other writers and reviewers, including Arthur Miller and Lionel Trilling ’25, Kennedy published eight novels and a novella. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was a staff editor for Collier’s Encyclopedia and then for the Encyclopedia Americana, all while continuing to write.

Kennedy began teaching at Columbia in 1982 and also taught graduate writing courses at NYU and Boston University. At Columbia, he was known as a gifted teacher and mentor, as well as for after-class literary roundtables at The West End.

Kennedy served in the Army before entering the University of Massachusetts–Amherst; he graduated in 1960 with a degree in English. He is survived by a daughter, Branwynne. His wife, Gloria, died in 2002.

McKENNA: Paleontologist Malcolm C. McKenna, professor emeritus of geological sciences at Columbia and retired Frick curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, died on March 3, 2008, in Boulder, Colo. He was 77.

McKenna taught and worked with generations of Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences paleontology graduate students at AMNH from 1960 until his retirement in 2000. He specialized in the history of mammalian evolution, but also published interdisciplinary work in cosmology, astrophysics, geology and molecular biology. After retirement, McKenna held adjunct positions at the University of Colorado and the University of Wyoming. He was awarded the Romer-Simpson Medal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists in 2001, and the Gold Medal of the Paleontological Society of America in 1992, the top honors in his profession.

Born in Pomona, Calif., in 1930, McKenna attended Caltech and Pomona College and earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He was a proponent of a new classification paradigm, cladistics, introduced in the 1960s. Through his affiliation with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, he also was an early supporter of continental drift theory.

He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Priscilla; children, Douglas, Andrew, Katharine and Bruce, and their spouses; and nine grandchildren. Memorial contributions may be made to The Malcolm C. McKenna Goler Research Fund, Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, 1175 W. Baseline Rd., Claremont, CA 91711.

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