Biography
Ennis Rees was born on March 17, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia. He received his A.B. degree from the College of William and Mary in 1946, a M.A. in 1948 from Harvard University, and a PH.D. from Harvard in 1951. From 1949 until 1952, Rees was an English instructor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and taught at Princeton from 1952 until 1954. He was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina from 1954 until 1957, an associate professor from 1957 until 1963, and was a professor of English from 1963 until he retired from teaching in 1988.
Mr. Rees had an extensive writing career. He has written poetry, translations, literary criticism, books about teaching poetry, and many popular books for children. Many of his children's books, including Brer Rabbit and His Tricks and More of Brer Rabbit's Tricks were illustrated by Edward Gorey and have now become national children's classics. Ennis Rees was appointed the Poet Laureate of South Carolina in 1984. Rees also contributed many articles and poetry to several journals, including Journal of English, Southern Review, New Republic, and Germanic Philology. Rees died in Columbia in March 2009.
