Dr. Ben Drew Kimpel Jr. was a great man, in the best sense of that term. He was born in 1915 in Fort Smith, the only son of prominent attorney Ben Drew Kimpel Sr. and Gladys Crane Kimpel.

His was a unique family. His paternal grandfather, David Kimpel, had emigrated from Germany and settled in the Arkansas town of Dermott, prospering in the cotton trade of Chicot County. Grandson Ben Jr. remembered with great nostalgia his boyhood sharing in the Delta culture with him on family visits.

Ben’s mother, described as “cultured, unassuming and strikingly beautiful,” born in Fort Smith and educated at Hollins College in Virginia, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant and granddaughter of Rev. William Carey Crane, the president of Baylor University.

Before Ben Jr.’s third birthday, his father died suddenly in the Spanish influenza pandemic that killed millions, spread by soldiers returning from the Great War. The much-admired Ben Sr. was considered another heroic casualty; the city flew the flags at half-mast in his honor. Five years later, Gladys married successful local businessman William E. Porter.

Ben Jr., a precocious language whiz, was tutored in French at age 8, won a Latin merit badge as an Eagle Scout, and graduated from Fort Smith High School at 14. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for two years before graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.A. in 1937 and M.A. in English in 1939. Afterwards, it was the University of North Carolina for a dissertation on Melville and a Ph.D., finished in the spring of 1942.

Pearl Harbor struck, and in August 1942 Dr. Kimpel enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. After intense language training to perfect his German and French, he landed shortly after D-Day and served as an interpreter. Eventually commissioned as a second lieutenant in public affairs, he administered the town of Erlangen, Germany; when ordered to reopen its university he replied, “I have already done that.”

In 1946 he was transferred from the Army to the State Department and posted to Vienna as first secretary and vice counsel, serving there until 1950. One of his many duties was to help refugees fleeing Soviet occupation. He learned Russian and acquired a lifelong appreciation for Russian language and literature.

In her biography “Ben Kimpel,” the late Dr. Susan Wade Wink quoted a former student who asked him to list the five greatest novels of world literature. He responded: “The Brothers Karamazov,” “War and Peace,” “The Possessed,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “Ulysses.”

After being transferred to Washington D.C., Kimpel did not find bureaucracy fulfilling. He left the department in 1951 for an academic career with post-doctoral study at Harvard in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, then full-time employment at the University of Arkansas as professor of English. From 1952 until his death in 1983 he taught over 50 different courses in English, American and world literature, and spoke or read eight languages.

His cultural impact is difficult to overestimate, but Dr. Kimpel wore his erudition lightly. A man of humility, generosity and compassion, his influence on the intellectual development of his students, this writer included, the University of Arkansas and, indeed, our state, was immeasurable.

An inveterate traveler, Dr. Kimpel taught in the fall and spring and traversed the world in the summer. It is no exaggeration to say that he saw and read practically everything worth seeing and reading. A gourmet, whose weight soared up and down, he once took an eating tour of France.

A chain smoker of Camels, the statue of him in front of U of A’s Kimpel Hall is a bit amiss with only one packet; he always had two, one in each breast pocket.

In April 1983 he died at age 67 of a heart attack while working on his lineby-line explication of the Cantos of poet Ezra Pound. His close friend and colleague Dr. Thomas

Cary Duncan Eaves found him in his favorite armchair with an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a folder of matches near his hand.

While his “Samuel Richardson, A Biography,” co-authored with Eaves, was considered by many to be definitive, his work on Ezra Pound was anticipated to be his masterpiece. He hoped to finish it by 1985, the 100th anniversary of Pound’s birth. “There’s no final word on Pound. I’m shooting for the final word.” Kimpel said. The work is unfinished, so Dr. Kimpel’s early death was not only a tragic loss to his many friends and students but also a literary loss to the world.

Novelist Jack Butler, a former student of Dr. Kimpel and good friend of this writer, had conceived the idea of establishing a Kimpel Prize to be awarded to Arkansas writers or those with a substantial Arkansas connection. Jack conferred with Dr. Kimpel and was granted his imprimatur, provided it was named for his mother, Gladys Crane Kimpel Porter, so in this way it became The Porter Prize. Jack Butler was and remains the Prize’s founder and president.

Established as The Porter Fund, its annual prize has been awarded to 40 novelists, non-fiction writers, poets and playwrights. Originally $500. it’s now $5,000.

Honorees are selected by past winners, and they have been, among many others, Hope Coulter, Andrea Hollander, Werner Trieschmann, David Jauss, Michael Heffernan, Griff Stockley, Morris Arnold, Kevin Brockmeier, Shirley Abbott, Greg Brownderville, Trent Lee Stewart, Pat Carr, Mara Leveritt, Davis McCombs, Sandy Longhorn, Padma Viswanathan, Tyrone Jaege, Jen Fawkes.

The Prize also awards a scholarship to the University of Central Arkansas MFA writing program supervised by Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice, novelist and creative writing professor.

In 2004, The Porter Prize established a Lifetime Achievement Award for writers who have enjoyed a literary achievement over the course of an established career. This award and its $5,000 prize is celebrated at a gala evening every five years. Past winners have been Donald Harington (2004), Miller Williams (2009), Charles Portis (2014) and Jo McDougall (2019).

The Porter Prize is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024 by awarding its Lifetime Achievement Award to Patricia Spears Jones. Appointed the New York State Poet in 2023, Ms. Jones has an amazingly inspirational personal and brilliant professional life story.

Originally from Forrest City, in 1973 she graduated from Southwestern College of Memphis (now Rhodes College), and obtained an MFA from Vermont College. She migrated to New York City and lives in Brooklyn. Among many publications and numerous honors, she won the Walt Whitman Merit for Poetry and the prestigious Jackson Poetry Prize from “Poets & Writers.”

She is the author of “The Beloved Community,” “A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems,” and three other poetry collections. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, The Ocean State Review, Ms. Muse and other publications.

She was the first person of color to co-curate the Wednesday Night Series of St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1980s. She organizes the American Poets Congress, serves on the Board of Directors for The Poetry Project, and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.

In a statement she said, “I am glad to have my work as a poet, playwright, anthologist, and cultural activist appreciated in my home state by The Porter Fund. What a gift to the state to have this focus on the literature of living writers especially when so much about reading, writing, and thinking is under assault by those who do not want us to read, write or think for ourselves.”

Patricia Spears Jones will be honored Thursday at the Clinton Presidential Center with a 6 p.m. reception followed by a dinner and award presentation. For ticket information contact cjafund@swbell.net.