Homer C. Nearing Jr (April 15, 1915 – May 29, 2004) was an American professor and author of mathematically themed short fiction, often under the byline "H. Nearing Jr.".[1]
Nearing is best known for his humorous Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom series[2] published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the early 1950s,[3] with the protagonist being a surreal head of the mathematics department at Uh-Uh University.[4] One of Nearing's Professor Ransom short stories "The Maladjusted Classroom" was reprinted in the 1954 edition of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction[5] while "The Cerebrative Psittacoid" was reprinted in Best SF, edited by Edmund Crispin.[6] [7] His story "The Mathematical Voodoo," about a teacher struggling to teach math to students,[8] was reprinted in Fantasia Mathematica, a 1958 anthology on mathematical topics compiled by Clifton Fadiman.[9] A sequel featuring Professor Ransom entitled "The Hermeneutical Doughnut" was published in Fadiman's sequel anthology "The Mathematical Magpie".
Seven of the Professor Ransom stories from F&SF were also reprinted alongside four new stories[2] [10] in The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom, released in 1954 by Doubleday.[11] [12] [13] The collection functioned as a "consistently funny"[14] fix-up novel about the attempts by a pair of professors to create a union between science and the arts[13] by experimenting with different strange devices.[15] The book was reprinted in paperback in 1969 by Curtis Books and rereleased in 2015 by Singularity&Co, with a new review in Amazing Stories calling the stories "delightfully whimsical."[16]
Nearing also published poetry in The New Yorker.[17] [18]
In addition to writing fiction, Nearing was a published expert on historical English poetry and on British traditions concerning Julius Caesar.He was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and as an undergraduate competed on the university's varsity swimming team,[17] earning a letter in 1934, 1935, and 1936.[19] After earning bachelor's and master's degrees,[17] he completed his doctorate there in 1944, with the dissertation English Historical Poetry, 1599-1641.[20]
After working as a schoolteacher at Perkiomen School and the Episcopal Academy and as a manager at a shipbuilding company, he became a professor of English at Pennsylvania Military College,[17] which became Widener University in 1972. The Homer C. Nearing, Jr. Distinguished Professorship at Widener University is named for him.[21]
Nearing married Alice Eleanor Jones, who like Nearing earned a doctorate in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1944 and wrote speculative fiction. They had two children.[22]