Emeritus Professor Dr. Donald R. Holliday, who taught in the Department of English for over 30 years, passed away Aug. 24, 2024, in Nixa, Missouri.

Holliday was born Sept. 17, 1939, in Pinetop, Missouri, to Admiral Schley and Eva Mabel (Drane) Holliday. In his self-written obituary, Holliday described a hard-scrabble childhood on the family’s small tobacco farm.

After graduating from Hollister High School, Holliday enlisted in the U.S. Navy. One of his first assignments in the Navy was as an aviation boatswain’s mate to a guided missile cruiser during the Cuban missile crisis.

Holliday received full military honors at his burial in Gobblers Knob Cemetery, Hollister, Missouri, Sept. 7.

“First educational loves – learning and teaching”

Holliday began teaching at Missouri State in 1966 after having earned his master’s in English from University of Arkansas. He was granted educational leave to complete his PhD at the University of Minnesota. Holliday retired from MSU in 2001.

During his tenure at MSU, Holliday not only taught but also served as head of the English department in the 1980s, then as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Letters for two years.

But in his obituary, Holliday wrote that his “first educational loves [were] learning and teaching.”

In particular, he was most proud of having developed the English department’s course on Mark Twain. The course “filled every semester it was taught, to overloads,” he wrote.

Holliday believed Twain was the most important writer in American literature “because, a century before any other notable writer took up the subject, Mark Twain tried to show Americans the stupidity and blindness not only of slavery, but of white superiority itself.”

Career focused on the Ozarks

Throughout his academic career, Holliday placed special emphasis on the Ozarks. In 1975, he helped create MSU’s Ozarks Studies program. Along with Drs. Robert Gilmore and Robert Flanders, Holliday also coedited the OzarksWatch Magazine, then became its editor from 1993-2001.

“I am especially grateful for his knowledge of and love for the Ozarks and his leadership in establishing our formal program in Ozarks Studies,” said emeritus professor of English Dr. Kris Sutliff, who worked alongside Holliday in the 1980s and 1990s.

Even his dissertation topic was about the Ozarks. In fact, professor of history and Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies Dr. Brooks Blevins could not help but marvel at how Holliday arrived at that topic, which researched an early Ozarks pioneer family – the Hollidays.

“Who else besides Don Holliday would have ventured up north to graduate school…and proceeded to convince his professors to let him write a dissertation about his own family?” Blevins said. “Now, this may have been right up there with the best sales jobs ever pulled off by someone from Taney County.”

“This was at the height of 1970s fascination with the Ozarks,” Blevins continued, “and the Hollidays of Pinetop must have seemed every bit as exotic and colorful as ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ to a set of Minnesota professors.”

Describing the dissertation as one of the best he had ever read, Blevins said it inspired him to include the Holliday family in his own work, the three-volume “A History of the Ozarks.”

“Don was a master storyteller, speaker and teacher, possessed of a combination of elite scholarly training, downhome horse sense and dry, store-porch wit,” Blevins said. [Read more…] about Remembering Dr. Donald Holliday, 1939-2024