Louise Cowan (1916–2015)

Louise Cowan, née Shillingburg, was born in Fort Worth, Texas. At age 20, she had a degree in music from Texas Christian University(TCU) and a scholarship for further music studies when she met her future husband Donald Cowan in a church choir. They married in 1939. Her husband served in the Air Force in World War II, then worked for an engineering firm, and then decided to become a physicist. The two went back to school at TCU. Louise completed her B.A. and earned an M.A. in English. She was 31 when the couple finished and went to Vanderbilt for graduate study. Their son was born in 1949, while both Cowans were working on their doctoral examinations. Louise and her husband finished their degrees and in 1953 came back to Fort Worth, where she began teaching at TCU. She went through a period of total blindness in 1955, and her sight was only partially restored. After six years, the couple moved to Dallas, where they taught at the University of Dallas, a private Catholic institution. She chaired the Department of English and became dean of the Institute of Philosophic Studies, while her husband became president of the university. She became a prominent figure in Dallas society and helped to shape core curricula for several liberal arts universities. Her books included The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (1959);
The Southern Critics: An Introduction to the Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Andrew Lytle (1971);
and
Invitation to the Classics (edited with Os Guinness, 1998). In 1991, she received the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities as a co-founder of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.