Discipline: Literature

Leo Hertzel

Discipline: Literature
Region: Duluth, MN
MacDowell Fellowships: 1970
Leo Hertzel (1924-2004) was a writer, scholar, and emeritus professor of English. His life was devoted to teaching, reading, writing, thinking, and traveling. Leo taught English and literature at the University of Minnesota Duluth for three years and then left to edit the Great Lakes Sailor, a newspaper for the seamen's union. His specialty was 20th century American literature. At the University of Wisconsin Superior he was instrumental in establishing their extended degree program, bringing educational opportunities to people who lived in remote areas of northern Wisconsin. He was an excellent teacher who three times won the university's Max H. Lavine Award for distinguished scholarship. He spent a year as a visiting lecturer at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where he studied for his doctorate. After retirement, he became an adjunct professor at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, where he and Prof. John Schifsky developed “Growing Up American,” “Words and Place,” and “Prose for Principals,” summer institutes that brought rural Midwestern teachers and principals to the college to study American literature. He also taught many emeritus courses up the North Shore and on the Iron Range. He was a contributing editor to the North American Review for more than 30 years, where he published scores of articles on a wide variety of upper Midwest issues: the Monticello nuclear power plant, bovine growth hormones, foosball, regional writers, and St. Paul's F. Scott Fitzgerald festival.

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Leo Hertzel worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.

In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…

Learn more