Steven F Walker

Steven F. Walker, resident of Highland Park since 1971, passed away quietly in his sleep at the age of 80 on December 12, 2024.

He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1944, the son of Herman Walker and Elizabeth Friemel Walker. Steven’s father was a senior U.S. State Department official who led negotiations of major economic treaties in Paris in the mid-1950s. While living in Paris with his family Steven studied for three years at the Ecole Alsacienne, developing a native-speaker knowledge of French.

From 1961 to 1965 he attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, majoring in Greek but also studying French and Sanskrit. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and then a National Defense scholarship to study Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 1965 and earned his Ph.D. there in 1973. He taught Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick from 1971 to 2021, offering undergraduate courses as varied as Introduction to Mythology, Classical Backgrounds of Modern Literature, Sacred Texts, and Tragedy. He taught Sanskrit a couple of times and inaugurated the course Introduction to the Literatures of India in the early 1980s. For the Graduate Program he taught seminars focusing on the literature of the Renaissance and the interrelation of literary and filmic texts across cultures and times and directed several Ph.D. dissertations. For the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program he taught the seminars The Odyssey, Jung for the Twenty-first Century, and Scapegoating. Steven earned the respect and affection of countless undergraduate and graduate students.

One undergraduate in his Tragedy course wrote: “The amount of knowledge locked within Walker’s brain is incomprehensible. He is wildly brilliant, and still incredibly approachable…Walker is a God among mere mortals, and I consider it a privilege to have studied under him.” Steven was a distinguished scholar.  After publishing his first book on the Ancient Greek poet Theocritus (1980) and his second book on the pastoral (1987), he turned his attention to the theories of C.G. Jung, publishing the book considered a classic introduction to the theories of Jung: Jung and the Jungians on Myth (1995; expanded edition 2002). He also published Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film: Jungian and Eriksonian Perspectives (2012), and in his final book, Cryptic Subtexts in Modern Literature and Film: Secret Messages and Buried Treasure (2018), he explored the interrelations of literary and filmic texts across cultures and times. In addition, he published articles on the origins of Sanskrit drama and on the modern writers Stéphane Mallarmé, Salman Rushdie, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Toni Morrison. Steven‘s erudition was matched by his humanity.

He was a generous and warm friend to many: people came away from conversations with him feeling both intellectually enriched and cared for. He loved the piano and, after learning from his first piano teacher in Paris that playing the piano was for enjoyment and not for competition, he cultivated the classical composers Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, and Bach and entertained many friends over the years with his soulful playing. He loved cats too and he enjoyed traveling, visiting most European countries as well as Japan, the Soviet Union, Singapore, Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand. In his later years he especially enjoyed taking transatlantic cruises, often with dear friends.

From his twenties onward Steven chose the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung as a psychological mentor and the nineteenth-century Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna as his spiritual lodestar. He was a supporting member of the Vedanta Society of Boston from 1965 to his death and of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York from 1971 to around 1990.

He is survived by his wife, Janet Walker, who first met him in fall 1963. Together they pursued an intellectual journey to Harvard as graduate students and then to Rutgers as professors. They were devoted to each other “for better or for worse,” their emotional and spiritual bond deepening over 61 years. Steven will be dearly missed by Janet as well as by his nephew George Lauber and his wife Heather of Des Moines, Iowa; by five cousins living in the Midwest; and by many loving friends here and around the world.

A memorial service will be held in the coming months.  Please check back for a date & time.

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Steven F Walker, please visit our floral store.