OBITUARIES: Professor Eric Mottram

To your obituaries of Eric Mottram [by John Calder and Clive Bush, 19 January], may I add that he was a most distinguished alumnus of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies? writes John Gillard Watson. As a participant in the Summer Session 1953

he was, if I remember right, in Harry Levin's seminar on the symbolic novel. He returned as a faculty member in 1975. There could be no better evidence of the value of the still-flourishing Salzburg Seminar.

Eric Mottram was not the first professor of American literature in Britain; Geoffrey Moore was appointed to a chair in American Literature in 1962, at Hull University.