Description:
John Jay Allen is honored for his tremendously influential contributions to the worlds of Cervantine and Spanish Golden Age scholarship in this fascinating collection of articles:


JOHN JAY ALLEN was born May 20, 1932 in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his older brother Dick attended public primary and secondary schools. Dick, who now lives in Florida, enlisted as a seaman in the navy after college, and, after an outstanding career, retired as a Captain. While growing up, Jay was an avid swimmer throughout his high school years and also worked as a lifeguard during the summers. As afreshman at Duke University in 1954, Jay was amember ofthe freshman swim team and competed in springboard diving. He studied for one semester in París during his junior year and graduated from Duke University with a major in English and American literature in 1954.

The summer following his graduation, Jay volunteered for the draft (Korean Conílict) and, subsequently, served in the army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps in Panama and the Canal Zone. There he met and married Tulia Elena Rodríguez in 1956. They have two daughters, Luly (Tulia) and Tisha (Leticia). Luly is an elementary school teacher in Maui, and her son Gregory is a junior at the University of Florida. Tisha is a lawyer with the INS Asylum Program in Nutley, New Jersey, where she lives with her daughter Rachel, who is in the third grade.

Upon completing his two-year military obligation, Jay entered Middlebury College’s M.A. program in Madrid. In 1957 he received his degree on the Vermontcampus, where he also waited tables. In 1960 Jay earnedhis Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, with a dissertation on Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares under the supervision of Mack Singleton. In addition, he worked for two years as a research assistant for Lloyd Kasten while Kasten prepared the Tentative Dictionary oj Medieval Spanish. Jay was the recipient of the University of Wisconsin’ s Knapp Advanced Graduate Fellowship, 1959-60.