Arthur M. Wilson, A.M. '40, Daniel Webster Professor

Arthur M. Wilson, A.M. '40, Daniel Webster Professor and Professor of Biography and Government Emeritus, has won the National Book Award for arts and letters for his Diderot, an encyclopedic work on the 18th-century encyclopedist.

The 1972 Oxford University Press publication includes an earlier volume, Diderot: The TestingYears, 1713-1759, which, in manuscript, won the Modern Language Association Oxford Prize in 1954 and the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize on publication in 1957. Professor Wilson had won the Adams prize also in 1938 for a book on Cardinal Fleury.

A Rhodes Scholar from Yankton College in South Dakota, Professor Wilson taught briefly at Grinnell College in lowa after his return from Oxford. He joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1933 after receiving his doctorate in history from Harvard. In addition to his teaching, he had been before his retirement in 1967 director.of the Great Issues Course and of the Senior Fellowship program.

The publication of Diderot was the culmination of 36 years of intensive and extensive research, which branched out from the Norwich "Diderot factory" - as Professor Wilson has dubbed his study - to libraries and museums throughout Europe and the United States. On this long scholarly journey he has been accompanied by his wife and amanuensis Mazie, of whom former President Dickey wrote in the preface of a festschrift dedicated last year to Professor Wilson on his 70th birthday, "She truly knows her Diderot - as well as his Diderot."