Frederick Merk came to Harvard from Wisconsin. He brought his West with him and nurtured it in Cambridge, as a student, teacher, and scholar, for more than six decades. Born in Milwaukee, he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1911, worked for five years on the staff of the State Historical Society, moved to Harvard in 1916 to begin graduate study under Frederick Jackson Turner, won a prize for his dissertation, and in 1921 received his first faculty appointment as an instructor. His cursus honorum brought him in 1946 to the Gurney Professorship. A quarter of a century earlier he had shared the teaching of various courses with Charles H. Mcllwain, Edward Channing, and Arthur M, Schlesinger. A colleague and contemporary of Samuel Eliot Morison, among others, Merk in the latter year of his tenure taught graduate students who are now still a decade from retirement. His career, then, spanned the first three or four generations of professional historians, and his benign and rigorous influence continues to imbue American university classrooms.

He was a small man, but big-boned, especially his hands, craftsman's hands. He had a singularly narrow face with a large, responsive mouth and inquiring eyes behind unobtrusive spectacles. Winter and summer he wore dark suits, white shirts, dark ties, black shoes, and, on cold days, sometimes a wool cardigan. Even in his eighties his erect posture accentuated his determined walk. His throaty, rather high voice had a penetrating quality, not the least because of his controlled, meticulous diction. He did not smoke or drink alcoholic beverages, he had no small talk, he was never a familiar of his students, never a gregarious hail-fellow, and yet his generosity