by Mike Sanfilippo Born in Correy, Pennsylvania, William "Harry" Clemons graduated with high honors from Wesleyan in 1902. While at Wesleyan, Clemons was a member of Psi Upsilon fraternity and Phi Beta Kappa. He received a masters degree from Princeton in 1905 and taught English there from 1904-1908. He studied at Oxford University as a Jacobus Fellow in 1906. Clemons continued to work at Princeton as a reference librarian until 1913. In 1913, Clemons left Princeton to take a position at the University of Nanking in China. He headed the English department there from 1913-1920, and served as librarian from 1914-1927. He was an American Library Association representative with the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia from 1918-1919. He married Jeannie Cooper Jenkins in 1918 and had two children: Henry Jenkins (b.1919) and Emily Barber (b.1921). When anti-Western violence broke out in Nanking in 1927, Clemons narrowly escaped death and returned to the United States and took a position as University Librarian at the University of Virginia. He held this position until his retirement in 1950. Clemons was the author of a bibliography of Woodrow Wilson's writings and a history of the University of Virginia Library. Clemons was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Wesleyan in 1942. He died on August 30, 1968 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

 

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