“In the late 1950s he was still comfortable with the traditional format of the college course. All of his students from that era will remember Mr. Gaudino’s rigor on matters of substance by the page-by-page and sometimes line-by-line reading of important texts. Fewer, perhaps, will recall his insistence, true to Williams’ tradition, on felicity of writing style. On one of my papers, Mr. Gaudino observed that what I had written was far less clear that the original writings of these authors. “What is clear to you has passed through you mind, been seen profoundly, and come out less clear than it went in.” On another paper, on Graham Greene’s novel, “The Quiet American,” he wrote, “Your style makes for difficulty in reading but comprehension is not impossible and there are isolated islands of clarity.”

–Richard Herzog,
’60