Dr. John C. Hodges earned the bachelor’s degree from Meridan College (1911), the master’s from Tulane University (1912), and the PhD from Harvard (1918). He did an additional year of graduate study at the University of Wisconsin before serving as instructor in English at Northwestern for three years and as associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan before joining the faculty of UT’s English Department in 1921. He served as assistant head of the department in 1937, acting head 1938–41, and head 1942–62.
Soon after his arrival, Hodges assumed responsibility for the freshman English program. He designed a system of not only the writing of papers but also of seeing that papers were corrected and revised. Students kept their papers in a folder, and at the end of the quarter they turned in their folders with the corrected papers. The folders were kept for several years, and it was thus possible for Hodges to analyze the types of deficiencies the papers displayed and to tabulate the frequency of different types of errors. It was this work that led him to formulate the concept of the Harbrace College Handbook, first published in 1941, which sought to simplify the points of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.
When the university adopted Harbrace College Handbook as a textbook for freshman English in 1941, Hodges set aside the royalties from its sale on the UT campus, and later added the royalties from sales at other colleges. He also made additional contributions to this fund and, prior to his death in 1967, established with the university the Hodges Better English Fund, which had assets of approximately $200,000 at the time of his death. His will required that the full professors of the English Department control expenditures of the earnings from the fund and also provided that the Better English Fund would receive the annual royalties from the handbook. The fund is now worth several million dollars.
Dr. Hodges was a Congreve scholar and a strong advocate of the need for excellent library resources. Following his retirement, Hodges devoted much of his time to assisting the library in fundraising and cultivation of donors. In 1970 the English Department commissioned artist Anita Woods to paint a portrait of him, which was unveiled in January 1971.