Jean Maurice Duke died October 10, 2026, at age 92. He taught in the Department of English for more than 30 years. With him, a part of VCU’s history died. 

His legacy lives on at James Branch Cabell Library. Duke cataloged Cabell’s vast personal library and was instrumental in attaching the writer’s name to the library, dedicated in 1976, and bringing Cabell’s Library to VCU. 

Duke’s road to VCU was winding. Born in Richmond to working class parents in 1934, Duke was a high school drop-out. He later said “I hated school and I hated everything about it. I quit school and went to work in a shop rebuilding carburetors and fuel pumps. My goal was to own a car and that is the only goal that I had at the time,” Duke recalled in a 2005 oral history interview. He did go back and finish high school and then joined the Navy. As a photographer for the Navy, he traveled the globe and during his service, he became an avid reader.  

That love of literature propelled him toward higher education. As the son of a man with a fourth-grade education and as the first in his family to go to high school, higher education was not his natural path. “I was totally self-taught,” he said in his oral history. “As Melville said about himself, ‘The sea was his Harvard and his Yale,’ and that was the case with me too. That is how I got the education, to begin with anyway. I went as far as I could and I thought, ‘I’m going to need some professional work in literature if I stay in this business.’ And that is what led me to college.”

He enrolled in Richmond Professional Institute and later transferred to the College of William and Mary, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962. He earned a master's degree in 1965 at the University of Iowa. He and his wife, Anne, both earned doctorates in English at the University of Iowa. Iowa was, at that time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a national center for writers.  

According to Duke, Iowa had one of the best known, creative writing departments in the world. “When you mention a writer’s name of the 20th century, chances are that he or she had some affiliation with Iowa somewhere along the way. Philip Roth lived down the street from me. Kurt Vonnegut was on the faculty when I was there and so on and so on.” 

Iowa had an excellent faculty, graduate faculty, in English. Some people on the faculty knew who Cabell was. “They had read him but they hadn’t studied him. Nobody there had published on him.” Duke wrote some master’s level papers about Cabell. Then, through connections in Richmond, Duke received permission from Cabell’s widow, Margaret Freeman Cabell,  to work in the author’s personal library at 3201 Monument Avenue. And, advisors at Iowa approved his dissertation topic, which amounted to cataloging Cabell’s library to understand how what the author read shaped what he wrote.   

“Cabell has been one of these people whose reputation has been up and down. He was just glorified and lionized in the 1920s, and then he fell out of favor,” Duke said.

Duke wrote in his dissertation: “During the first three decades of the 20th century, James Branch Cabell was among the leading American novelists. When he died in 1958 at the age of 79, he had published 52 volumes. In the last 20 years of his life, however, Cabell’s literary reputation declined, and at the time of his death fewer than five of his books were still in print. Anthologies no longer included him, nor did critical books and journals. Only recently has there been a renewed interest in his works.” 

Duke had training in analytical bibliography and Cabell’s Library had never been studied. He dived in. 

In 1967, Duke was working in the library every day. “I realized immediately what a rich collection it was. I went to Allan [Brown, head of the English Department] and said “You have a new library with no name on it. We ought to try to name the library for James Branch Cabell.” Duke and others made an appointment with Mrs. Cabell and asked if “we could use his name on the library. She said that she would think about it and let us know. So, she did think about it. I was working in the house every day and so I saw her every day. She told me, ‘I think if you name the library for James, I think his collection should go there.’” This was a boon because it was expected that the collection would go to the University of Virginia. 

In cataloging the 3,000-volume library, Duke personally handled and described every book. He typed the catalog on a black marble-top table using Cabell’s own ancient typewriter, both of which are now in the Cabell Room on the fourth floor of the library. 

“No one had worked in the library since Cabell’s death in the late ‘50s, and so I had to straighten up a few things. I found boxes of letters from people like H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, even found one from William Dean Howells—who was a major 19th century writer but not too well known in the 20th century—a little bit of correspondence with Bennett Cerf, who was then at Random House, regarding James Joyce; things such as that.”

Most of that correspondence–some of which Duke found tucked between the pages of Cabell’s books, became part of the Cabell Collection at VCU. Some items went elsewhere. “The first thing I thought I ought to do was throw some trash away. There was a cardboard box, which I was pretty sure was trash, and I got ready to take it and throw it out and I thought maybe I ought to look in it first. There were a couple of hundred letters from H. L. Mencken. Those letters I think went to the University of Virginia.” 

He completed his dissertation in 1968 and became, unofficially, the first head of Special Collections and Archives at VCU. Duke physically transported Cabell’s books and papers to campus to the Ginter House, which housed the library at that time. When construction on the upper floors of the library was complete in 1974, the collection was transferred to the fourth-floor Cabell Room designed by Mrs. Cabell to resemble a gentleman's library of the late Victorian period. 

The Cabell Room, James Brach Cabell Library, fourth floor.

Duke and his wife Anne, also an English scholar, taught for more than 30 years at VCU. He taught thousands of students and claimed to have some influence in creating the MFA in writing program at VCU. He edited a scholarly journal and served as book editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1969 to 1981.

Emeritus Dean of Libraries and University Librarian John E. Ulmschneider recalled that he had deep respect for Maurice Duke’s immense knowledge of all things Cabell and as an esteemed teacher. “But he touched me most as an enormously diverse talent: His life had no resemblance to the archetype of an English professor. A military photographer based on warships, a daring sailor, a lover of fast motorcycles, a rich source of stories about Cabell and all things Richmond, a literary scholar — he covered the bases of a renegade intellectual.”

“Dr. Maurice Duke was a foundational member of the Department of English, helping build a culture of learning, research and service that has made the College of Humanities and Sciences what it is today,” said Dean of the College Catherine Ingrassia. “His amazing personal story coupled with his commitment to Virginia history and literature and his myriad skills (sailor, reporter, scholar), made him someone whose teaching transcended the classroom. His energy infused the classroom and a community well beyond Richmond and VCU.”

“If VCU had a Hall of Fame of influential professors on VCU's legacy and history, Maurice would be in the top ten,” said Ray Bonis, former senior research associate in Special Collections and Archives, who worked in the department for 30 years. “He had a wealth of knowledge about Richmond’s history and the city’s literary legacy. In the early 1970s, he helped the Special Collections and Archives Department acquire its earliest book and manuscript collections. The department became an important repository in Virginia for what became 20th century Richmond literary manuscript collections from a variety of writers, poets, and others. That would not have happened without Maurice’s influence.”

Throughout his career, Duke maintained close ties to the library, including membership in the James Branch Cabell Associates, which works to keep the legacy of Cabell’s work alive. He was a member 2004-14.

Even though he was an avid sailor and aficionado of motorcycles and sports cars, leisure appealed to Duke less than scholarship and community service endeavors tied to research and photography, and he remained active and engaged long into retirement. Among his endeavors, he worked as staff historian for the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods (ACORN) and worked as a volunteer photographer for the Valentine Museum capturing images of 21st Century Richmond.

Inarguably, his most lasting mark of achievement is the library at 901 Park Avenue that bears the Cabell name. 

More about Maurice Duke in Legacy obituary 

Oral History Interviews

Dissertation cataloging Mr. Cabell’s library 

The James Branch Cabell Collection