In Memoriam: Norman Sims

Norman Sims, professor emeritus of journalism, died at home in Winchester, New Hampshire on May 15. He was born on January 26, 1948, in Paris, Illinois, to Julia Burnside Sims and H. Nolan Sims. He grew up in Mattoon, Illinois and graduated from Mattoon High School in 1966.

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Sims earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Illinois in 1971. After working at United Press International in Minneapolis for two years, he went back to receive an M.A. in American History from the University of Illinois Chicago, and then entered the Ph.D. program at Urbana, graduating in 1979. While there, he studied under his mentor, James W. Carey, in the College of Communication.

By 1979, he had arrived as an assistant professor in the Journalism Department at UMass Amherst, where he taught for 35 years, until 2014 when he retired as a full professor.

Norm published several books, some of which proved influential in the world of long-form narrative journalism: Literary Journalism, Literary Journalism in the 20th Century, The Literary Journalists, and True Stories, a Century of Literary Journalism. As a member and then president of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, he traveled worldwide.

For many years, he did volunteer work for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) in river hydropower relicensing cases, most notably on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts and more recently on the Connecticut River. He served on the AMC Board of Directors for 12 years, and was for most of those years chair of the Conservation Programs Committee. In 2016 he was awarded AMC’s Distinguished Service Award.

Sims was an expert whitewater canoeist. He paddled many big and small rivers including the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, the Rogue River in Oregon, and the Gauley River in West Virginia. During his early involvement in boating he built several wood-strip canoes, and in later years he owned and restored antique canoes. His last book, Canoes: A Natural History in North America, was co-authored by Mark Neuzil.

Survivors include his son Gordon, daughter-in-law Jill (nee Levasseur) and grandsons Oscar and Julian, his sister Julia Anne Petefish, his ex-wife Deborah Rubin, and his partner of 24 years, Diane deGroat. His brother Nolan Sims predeceased him.