By Eric Waggoner, Lutfi Hussein, Brandon Yuhas, Matt Evertson and Larry Ellis — May 4, 2026
Bert Bender, 1938-2026
Arizona State University Department of English Professor Emeritus Bert Bender passed away at his home, “Red Oak,” in Atascadero, California on January 29, 2026. It was his 88th birthday.
In his honor, several of us—former students, colleagues, and friends—have put together our thoughts on the meaning and joy Bert brought to our respective lives.
. . .
Eric Waggoner (PhD English ’01) Executive Director, West Virginia Humanities Council
For several of us in ASU’s PhD English program in the 1990s, Bert Bender was Coach and Captain. He was Doc, and occasionally Pop. He was a scholar and a fisherman. To echo the title of his 1990 study of American sea fiction — which I still have on my shelf at home, two thousand miles from where I first met him — Bert was a Sea Brother, despite years living and teaching in one of America’s driest climates.
Knowing Bert, listening to him talk about what he loved, gave me a love of sea literature as well. That Bert could make you feel the strange immensity of the ocean in the middle of the desert is a testament to the strength of his teaching, and his spirit, both of which were kind and warm and open.
Though Bert spent three years overseeing my dissertation project, I remember him best in moments that aren’t connected to that work.
I remember Bert arriving at an "American Literature Survey" class session, for which I was one of his teaching assistants, carrying over his shoulder a six-foot baleen plate from a whale’s mouth, the better to illustrate filter-feeding to a class reading Herman Melville. The students had no idea how to process this sight. I laughed about that moment for weeks.
I remember the night Bert and his wife Judith hosted several of us at their home, and the magnificent meal of grilled salmon and steak and chicken and garden vegetables they served to a group of graduate students who were, like most, living week to week on cheap beer and boxed rice. After dinner and too much wine I found a guitar somewhere and wound up sitting on Bert’s couch, playing the old Atlantic folk song “Greenland Whale Fisheries” for him. He was so happy he hugged me.
I remember the afternoon Bert took three of us on a long hike in the Sonoran Desert. Though the trail wasn’t an arduous one, by afternoon’s end the young guys were huffing and panting, the sweat evaporating on us as soon as it popped out, leaving that thin fine-grain salt layer my skin still remembers even today. By the time we returned to the lookout point by the parking lot, Bert’s Boys were on the wane. I made the last step up onto the pavement, utterly depleted. Of course, there was Bert already, light sweater draped jauntily over his shoulders and chatting easily with another group of hikers, in perfect wind, looking relaxed as if he’d just woken up from an hour’s nap.
Bert was rigorous. When I wrote the first draft of the final chapter for my dissertation, Bert read it, then told me not to bother revising it, but to go back and start it all over again. I did. He told me the same thing after reading my second attempt. Both times, he explained why in such a compassionate way that I never felt like a failure, only an inexperienced scholar working on a project he believed was worth finishing right. When I finally got my degree, Bert placed the doctoral hood on my shoulders himself.
The last time I saw Bert was in Berkeley California, at the Western States Literature Conference. Our old crowd of graduate students, now scattered across the country, gathered for dinner with him. He got to see all of us employed and happy and inching towards middle age. After that meetup he and I fell out of touch, which I’ll always regret. I think that night, at least, he could see how important he had been to all of us.
I wanted to be a teacher and a writer — to be, in public and private life, that kind of bookish oddball that used to be referred to as a “man of letters.” I’d been on that journey for years. Bert was the man who guided me through the last steps on the path from naif to professional. Every job I’ve held since is traceable to the six years I spent under his careful, tender guidance. Thanks, Coach. From all of us.
. . .
Lutfi Hussein (PhD linguistics ’06) Residential Faculty in English, Mesa Community College
I am writing this with a deep sense of loss, reflecting on a friendship that grew in unexpected yet meaningful ways. I did not know Bert Bender as a student knows a professor, but instead as a fellow traveler — someone whose intellectual life and love of the world extended far beyond the classroom.
We first met at Arizona State University when in 2003, Bert organized an anti-war poetry reading in protest of the war in Iraq. I was a graduate student in linguistics; he was already an established professor of American literature. That event was a fitting introduction to who he was: thoughtful, principled, and deeply aware of the human cost of war. He spoke about his time in the military during Vietnam, recalling how he had trained young people who were sent to war and wondering how many of them ever returned home. That question stayed with him — and it stayed with me.
From that first meeting, our connection grew around shared interests. We both loved nature, and soon we were hiking together in the Superstition Mountains. Bert introduced me to trails I would never have found on my own, and, more importantly, to a way of seeing. Our conversations moved easily between literature, philosophy, politics, cooking and the natural world. He had a sophisticated understanding of how people, animals and plants coexist — an ecological awareness that felt both intellectual and deeply lived.
There was something unmistakably fitting about Bert in those landscapes. I remember one hike when he pushed through dense brush and emerged with scratches along his arms, small lines of blood where branches had caught him. When I first saw that, I was alarmed, but he reassured me with calm ease—he simply bled easily, and he had gotten used to it, he said. The image stayed with me: Bert moving through the desert as if he belonged to it, marked lightly by it. It felt, in a way, as though he was part of the landscape itself.
After his retirement, Bert and his wife, Judith, moved to Atascadero in San Luis Obispo, California. Our friendship continued there. We hiked along the California coast and inland trails, and one day we took his boat to Santa Margarita Lake. He had named it “Queequeg,” a nod to his enduring love for “Moby-Dick” and the sea literature he studied so deeply. For Bert, literature was never confined to books—it lived in the world around him.
Bert and Judith were gracious hosts, always eager to share the places they loved—favorite trails, quiet spots, and meals that brought people together. Their hospitality reflected a broader generosity of spirit.
One of the most meaningful extensions of our friendship was Bert’s interest in my home country, Jordan. His curiosity about other cultures and languages was never superficial — it was genuine and sustained. When he told me he wanted to visit, I drew up an itinerary based on my experience as a tour guide. He and Judith embraced the journey fully, visiting Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the Baptismal Site, and Wadi Al-Mujib. What stood out most, though, was not only their appreciation of these places, but their engagement with the people and the culture.
Many will remember Bert as a distinguished scholar of American literature, especially for his work on sea literature and “Moby-Dick.” I will remember him as a companion in conversation and in exploration—someone who moved easily between ideas and landscapes, who asked questions that lingered, and who listened with care.
Bert’s absence is deeply felt. Yet he remains present — in the trails he walked, in the conversations he sparked, and in the lives he touched with quiet generosity and curiosity. He taught, in the fullest sense of the word — not only through scholarship, but through how he lived.
. . .
Brandon Yuhas (BA English ’97; MA educational policy ’22) PhD candidate and research assistant, ASU Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation
I met Bert Bender when I took his short fiction course in the fall of 1996. During that course, in the next-to-last semester of my bachelor’s degree, Bert introduced me to one of my favorite authors, Raymond Carver. Somehow, I had nearly made it through an English degree without ever reading Carver! I remember feeling then, probably for the first time in a literature class, that I was reading about people who were familiar to me, who lived in an America I could recognize. That was important to me because I felt like an outsider at ASU. I had transferred from community college during my junior year and had found it impossible to make friends. I attended full-time, five days a week, but I couldn’t afford to live on campus and had an hour to an hour-and-a-half-long commute. When I got home, I’d have to turn right around and head to “some crap job or another,” to use Carver's words.
My time at ASU wasn’t just lonely as a result; it was exhausting. It was all I could do to stay on my feet. When I missed the due date for our first essay in Bert’s class, I went to his office to ask for an extension. I was hoping he would accept my paper late for a reduced grade. Instead, he told me to turn it in when I could. No grade deduction, no making me feel worse than I already felt. When I was late with our final paper, I visited him in his office again, feeling even worse than I did the first time. I told him I was having a hard time writing about the piece I had selected (Rick DeMarinis’s “Horizontal Snow,” which also resonated with me). When he replied that it was a hard story to write about, I felt validated — not something I was accustomed to experiencing in college. During that meeting, I also told him about my long commutes and the difficult classes I had that semester, and he empathized with my situation. I felt like I had someone to share my emotional burden with. The following semester, as I was getting ready to graduate, I wrote a letter to the chair saying how much Bert had meant to me during my time at ASU. Bert mailed me a handwritten thank-you letter and a CD of some music he wanted to share. I’ve still got both.
That probably would have been the extent of my relationship with Bert, but at some point, I had business on campus and stopped by his office. He wasn’t there, but I took a Peace Corps information card from his office door, mailed it in, and emailed Bert to see what he knew about it. Bert had never been in the Peace Corps but was a big fan and offered to connect me to a former student of his who had. In July 1999, just a couple of weeks before leaving for a two-year stint in Uzbekistan, Bert mailed me an old copy of Ivan Turgenev’s “A Sportsman’s Notebook” with a handwritten note tucked into it to send me off. I took the book and the note with me. We corresponded throughout those two years and thereafter. When I got home from Uzbekistan, he bought me lunch, eager to catch up with me and learn what my Peace Corps life had been like, and see what was next for me.
In the fall of 2009, he supported my application to a graduate program in English. He also sent me a copy of his memoir “Catching the Ebb” and asked me to review it for him online. That email exchange is gone now, but my recollection is that he hoped for a second edition someday and said that a review would help him make the case for it. That may be true, but I think his real goal was to encourage me and build my confidence as a writer ahead of starting graduate school. At any rate, I had asked him to sign it for me, and inside the book, he had written, “For Brandon – True Ishmaelite and fellow voyager. Bert.”
My formal study of literature ended with my bachelor’s degree, so I never really knew Bert as the gifted and well-respected academic he was. To me, Bert was a fellow voyager. He helped me navigate lots of ups and downs in my life. He always made time to answer my emails. He was always quick to help with some advice or a letter of support. On short notice, he read over my personal statement for my PhD application and provided helpful suggestions. Later, he celebrated my admission to the program. And he was always in my corner. He never ceased calling out my strengths when I felt discouraged or like I didn’t measure up to my peers. His knowledge and experience far outweighed mine, but I don’t think Bert ever would have thought so, much less ever said so. As well as a friend, he was a mentor. I don’t know if I would be where I am today without him being a part of my life.
Now, writing all of this down, I’m reminded of Carver’s essay “Friends,” first published at about the time of Carver’s own passing. Writing about a photo of his friends and himself having a good time together, Carver writes, “…my heart moves, and I’m nearly fooled into thinking that friendship is a permanent thing. Which it is, up to a point.”
Of course, I’m reminded of this essay, and this text in particular, now, because Bert and I have reached that point in our friendship, our journeys having diverged one final time.
. . .
Larry Ellis (PhD English ’03) Teaching Professor Emeritus, ASU Department of English
I don’t recall where I first met Bert Bender. If memory serves, it was during the weeks leading up to the second Iraq War. It may have been at the poetry event he had arranged in ASU Tempe’s Secret Garden. Here, participants were invited to read works that spoke of the horrific consequences of armed conflict. Bert’s choice was Stephen Crane’s “War is Kind,” its heart-wrenching ironies relevant to this day.
Or perhaps it was on the corner of 24th Street and Camelback in Phoenix, where we demonstrated against the madness of the impending war. In addition to the quieter voices (ours among them), anarchists marched the crosswalks that squared the intersection, chanting and carrying a gigantic puppet of George W. Bush, its hands grasping rockets and lightning bolts, its legs clothed in movie cowboy chaps that bore the hemispheres of a conquered planet. As we stood talking, a cadre of bikers strode the line of protestors, casting the stink-eye and fingering the leather of holstered sidearms. The maps that illustrated their vests were of duty stations in Vietnam. They were clearly veterans of that war and didn’t take kindly to our issues with the one to come.
Bert and I were also veterans. He had been an officer in the army in the early 1960s. I had been an Air Force NCO during Vietnam following the Tet Offensive although I never served in-country. It’s not unusual for American vets to stand against the wars their nation chooses to fight, and Bert’s commitment to peace was powerful and enduring.
Bert’s academic focus on Melville, Hemingway, and American naturalism mirrored his love of wild spaces, as did the summers he spent as a professional salmon fisherman in the Cook Inlet of Alaska which he described in his memoir, “Catching the Ebb.” To join Bert on a hike was to put your resolution and endurance to the test, and to eat his dust as he patiently waited for you to catch up with him. Once, we descended into the rough backcountry of the Superstition Mountains near Canyon Lake, boulder hopping the dry wash of LaBarge Creek with views of Battleship Mountain and Weaver’s Needle to our right. At the end of our trek we entered the LaBarge Canyon Narrows, an amphitheater of smooth-faced rock enclosing a pool of water that never seemed to go dry. Birdsong echoed from the cliffs as we washed down our lunch with a bottle of red wine before heading back.
And there was the time Lutfi Hussein and I met Bert at a trailhead just south of Payson for a hike into the Mazatzal Mountains. He had camped there overnight and somehow had managed to manhandle a huge boulder up a ramp of two-by-fours onto the rear of his Toyota pick-up. He asked Lutfi and me to seat the beast further up on the bed. We could barely move it. Later, he delivered it to Red Oak, his home in Atascadero, California where it stands today. On the way, his truck succumbed to its weight and suffered a damaged suspension.
The most memorable of the hikes I took with Bert was to the top of a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Central California – a spot that he and his wife Judith called The Edge of the World. We were there to celebrate the marriage of former student Matt Evertson and his fiancée Brenda. As the fog crawled up the mountainside from Highway 1, Bert conducted a brief service (he had been certified to perform civil marriage ceremonies) and Matt and Brenda read their vows. Afterwards, he prepared a wedding feast of hot soup, bread, goat cheese, and, of course, wine. It couldn’t have been a finer afternoon.
I don’t use the term gentleman often. From James Steerforth, Bertie Wooster, and James Bond to the ubiquitous silhouette on the restroom door, it has accumulated a peculiar baggage. Perhaps we should think of a gentleman as one who lives according to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s dictum of basic human decency and Ernest Hemingway’s ideal of grace under pressure. In that vein, Bert Bender was a gentleman of the highest order, and a dear friend.
So long, Bert. See you down the pike.
. . .
Matt Evertson (PhD English ’03) Professor of English, Western Colorado University
The morning that I got word that my wonderful friend and dissertation advisor Bert Bender had passed away at his home in Atascadero, California, I was busy getting ready for my morning coursework at Western Colorado University. We knew he was dying; over the past few years “a-fib” may have knocked down his stamina, but never his heart. He was the most fit and active man I ever met. Well into his 70s, I could not keep up with him on a hike. He was notorious at ASU for taking his grad students out to the Superstition Mountains for “short” treks ending in the reward of a “shore lunch” against the lapping waters of an isolated cove in Canyon Lake, leaving many of us young scholars depleted for days afterward. I have a fond memory of floating on that lake with Bert in his tiny fold-out boat, “Pip,” when I returned to the Valley on Easter weekend in April of 2003, preparing for my defense on campus that following week. We spoke of so many things on the water — but very little about my dissertation.
So, it was hard to process what Bert called the “adventure” we all must face. My wife and I had last seen him in person, in California, in June of 2019, when I was out at UC Davis for an Environmental Literature Conference and we took the train south to Oakland. He met us at Jack London Station (very appropriate!) and then drove us further south to spend a couple of days at his beautiful retirement home “Red Oak” with his beautiful wife Judith — they were always so kind and generous to us.
This was right around the time my father was facing his own struggle with terminal liver disease, and Bert and I commiserated on his deck overlooking his red oaks, his “granary tree,” dozens of bird feeders and the hills of Atascadero — we talked a lot about life and death (as this was very much the subject of our literary studies), and Bert’s heart issues were just starting to suggest some dire outcomes — but you would not have known that then. We went on several hikes and went down to Morro Bay for another one of his famous shore lunches. That morning we woke up in their lovely guest bedroom with a bank of windows that opened right onto the rolling, tree-studded landscape — our honeymoon suite ten years previous. Through tears I told Brenda that I sensed this might be our last gathering with Bert at Red Oak.
Since he had placed that hood on me at graduation in Wells Fargo Arena in 2003, Bert had continued to be a consistent and reliable presence in my life and my academic career, despite the long distance. It was Bert who encouraged me to accept a year-to-year position at Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska in 2001 while I was still finishing my dissertation — which I completed in 2003, the same year of his retirement, and my acceptance of a tenure-track position at that same school. A year later, now an assistant professor of English, I met Bert at an American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco where I was presenting a chapter from my dissertation on Theodore Roosevelt and Steven Crane. We had lunch afterwards near the wharf—chowder in sourdough bread bowls and vigorous discussion with some of the leading scholars in our field. Later, he offered fatherly advice about both my career trajectory and my troubles at home.
Three years later, we met in Newport Beach, Orange County, for a 2007 Literary Realism and Naturalism conference where he got to meet my future wife, Brenda, and they immediately hit it off. Two years later, Bert generously offered to take us up to one of his favorite spots along the Central Coast — Ragged Point — for yet another “easy” hike up to a little natural chapel above the clouds, the “Edge of the World” where you could look out on the Pacific and the forests below. With that backdrop, he recited from E.E. Cummings (“I thank you god for most this amazing day”) and Brenda and I exchanged our poetic vows (Emily Dickinson).
In 2012, we retraced these journeys with blended family on a summer vacation where we made the kids take the same “short” hike up Ragged Point and stay in the same house and meet Bert and Judith. It’s a favorite memory among us all, recorded in pictures and a video I treasure of Bert goofing around with the kids who were sleeping in what we called his “captain’s quarters,” an upstairs loft filled with all his books and maritime knickknacks.
A few years later the Western Literature Association conference was being held at Berkeley, and Bert drove the three-plus hours to hang with some of his former students, including my classmates Larry (who was also there at the Edge of the World as my Best Man) and Eric (a veteran of Bert’s classes, including his famous Hemingway “Heminar”). Between conference events he took us on tour of campus, and then we drove and hiked up to Wildcat Peak to look out over the Bay Area.
After 2019, we didn’t see each other face to face, but I sent Bert frequent reports of our doings — how the kids were growing into adult lives, articles I wanted to share or writing I was proud of, or professional achievements I wanted to boast about. We sent each other books, and I kept him apprised of my teaching passions—and a couple of years ago, when I took a late career leap of faith and accepted a position teaching literature on the western slope of the Rockies, he was giddy about our move. But then about a year ago he wrote me that he felt kind of “guilty” for living on past the timeframe the docs had told him was likely. “As for me, definitely no trails, but frequent need for a cane” he wrote. “It ain't all bad. What the hell, I'm an old rascal, lucky, I guess, to have what I have — especially the love and care of Judith. And for loved old friends who help us old rascals keep remembering why life is good.” The last several months through the occasional emails it was clear that he was nearing the end. He suffered a stroke last Fall, but I was so shocked a couple of weeks later to get an email from him--he was hanging in there, but ready. We sent him pictures from our recent adventures in Moab celebrating our anniversary. Here is what he wrote:
Dear Matt: Oh, man, I enjoyed your message with the pics. Again, I am so happy that you've made this move. The pics have added so much to these 17 years! That was a great day. We are plugging along but my ailments are getting worse. Hospice, oxygen, morphine, sleep. I can't believe that I'm still knocking on the door to the black nothingness and actually welcome that trip — except leaving Judith to do her last time alone. We've had a wonderful marriage.
Bert was the exact right person for me to learn from at the exact right time in my life. I was a narrow-minded farm kid who based his ethics and understanding of the world on football rather than philosophy, or Darwin, or compelling worlds created on the page speaking to the human condition. Any teacher could have helped me to continue to navigate texts, but Bert helped me tune into not only the subtext, but the text beneath the subtext which is ultimately the law of life, the shared humanity, the struggles and the miracle, despite it all, of existence.
I know these influences don’t always come through on student evaluations or graduation hugs—but I’ve had a few students over the years help me know that we made an impact, and I tried to make sure Bert knew that as well — that I hope even a touch of his legacy lives on through me, and the idea that force somehow lives on in my students — what I say and do and explore with them both in and outside of the classroom drives me through those dark days in our profession — those challenging courses and those exhausting weeks. I like to think our questing, searching, Martin Eden-like thirst for learning is part of what Bert showed us.
Years ago, at the start of my career, Bert sent me a dogged copy of John Williams’ campus novel “Stoner.” Though it may seem like an odd choice given its rather dark depiction of the academic life, I now explore the novel with my students in senior seminar because of what it proclaims about this life of the mind and the profession we have chosen. After a devoted, middling career which seemed to be meaningful only to him, Professor Stoner, suffering from the cancer that has forced him from the classroom, speaks at his poorly-attended retirement ceremony some of the most poignant words I have encountered in the depiction of the academic life:
He was silent for a long time as he looked from face to face. He heard his voice issue flatly. “I have taught…” he said. He began again. “I have taught at this University for nearly forty years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught, I might have —” He paused, as if distracted. Then said, with a finality. “I want to thank you all for letting me teach.”
I will forever be grateful to what you have taught me, Bert — and will always look for you beneath my boot-soles. And I will not only stop somewhere waiting for you — along some trail under towering aspens, or visiting the coast of Alaska, or returning to Ragged Point, or even in the concluding words on an impactful page. I will meet you there. You are energy that does not dissipate. You are with us always.
A wise man told me years ago, “you got to have confidence steering.” Thanks for the wild ride, Bert. We miss you, and we love you very much.
. . .
Bert Bender’s final published work was “Hemingway’s Iceberg and the Darwinian ‘War of Nature,’” published in The Hemingway Review. He asked us to share it with the department.
Let’s end our tribute with a passage from Hemingway’s memoir, “A Moveable Feast.” Confronting difficulties that he was encountering in his writing, he concluded: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” After that, everything would follow.
A life well-lived may become that one true sentence, and a fitting send-off to the adventures to come.