Emily Morison Beck, at 88; edited Bartlett's Quotations
Emily Morison Beck, a Boston Brahmin of formidable intellectual pedigree who edited three editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, died Sunday of kidney failure at her Canton home. She was 88.
Mrs. Beck edited the 13th, 14th, and 15th editions of the celebrated reference book, a compendium of famous sayings first published in 1855 by John Bartlett, a Cambridge bookseller.
Mrs. Beck came by her sense of the past naturally. Her father was Samuel Eliot Morison, the renowned Harvard historian whose statue sits on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.
Mrs. Beck worked part time on Bartlett's 13th edition, which came out in 1955. Her most memorable triumph was saving from removal Shakespeare's "this scepter'd isle" speech, from "Richard II." An executive at Little, Brown, which publishes Bartlett's, had urged its deletion, writing in the margin "too chauvinist."
By the time of the 14th edition, which came out in 1968, Mrs. Beck was editor in charge. She included for the first time quotations from Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Little, Brown again turned to her for the 15th edition, published in 1980. "I just couldn't stand the idea of a new Bartlett's with someone else's name on it," Mrs. Beck said in a 1981 Globe interview.
Mrs. Beck could be fierce in her pursuit of a correct citation for Bartlett's. Yet she was not above letting serendipity take a hand in providing new entries. While reading an autobiographical essay by Graham Greene, she came across a quotation from "Madame Bovary" -- "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." "It occurred to me we didn't have anything" from Gustave Flaubert's novel, she told the Globe, so she included it.
For all her grounding in history and tradition, there was nothing hidebound about Mrs. Beck's stewardship of Bartlett's. She took pride in excising quotations from what she called "the Crappy Poetry Society." The removal of CPS entries cleared the way for contemporary writers and speakers. Among the new names Mrs. Beck brought into Bartlett's were Muhammad Ali ("Float like a butterly, sting like a bee"), Mario Puzo ("I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"), Marshall McLuhan ("The medium is the message"), and Neil Armstrong ("That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind").
Emily Marshall Morison was born in Boston on Oct. 25, 1915. Her mother was Elizabeth Shaw (Greene) Morison. Mrs. Beck graduated from Concord Academy and Radcliffe College and completed a year of postgraduate study at Cambridge University.
She worked as an editor for two New York publishing houses, Harper & Brothers (now HarperCollins) and Alfred A. Knopf. In 1946, she married Brooks Beck, a lawyer. When he took a job with a Boston law firm, she became an editor at Atlantic Monthly Press. She continued to work for Atlantic Monthly, with time out for Bartlett's, until 1975.
Mrs. Beck leaves a sister, Catharine Cooper of Islington, England; two sons, Cameron of Canton and Gordon of Larchmont, N.Y.; a daughter, Emily, also of Larchmont; and three grandchildren. Mrs. Beck's husband died in 1969.
Funeral services will be private.
