Tragedy in Happy Valley

Audrey Rodgers was born in New York in 1923, the daughter of David and Rebecca Tropauer. She attended Walton High School and received a B.A. degree from Hunter College in the City of New York with a Major in English. After her marriage to Allan Rodgers in 1944, they moved to Madison, Wisconsin where she taught English for three years at the University of Wisconsin. A further move brought them to the Pennsylvania State University where she taught in the English Department and earned a Ph.D. in English. Prof. Rodgers taught at Penn State for 38 years, retiring as Professor Emerita in 1994. Her specialty was modern American poets. Prof. Rodgers was also the first Women Studies Director and was instrumental in formulating the program, so that today Women Studies offers a Ph.D. and enjoys a faculty of women with Ph.D. degrees. Among Prof. publications, she is the author of The Universal Drum, The Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Roethke; Virgin and Whore, The Image of Women in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams; Denise Levertov, The Poetry of Engagement, and several journal essays on women’s poets, Emily Dickinson, and T.S.Eliot.