From the beginning, Professor and Ms. Keeley have been at the center of campus social life, hosting parties and picnics for new hires, graduate students and visiting professors.
“Newcomers to Princeton were made to feel welcome amid a dazzling ensemble of writers, poets, professors and friends from both Princeton and New York,” said Joyce Carol Oates, who arrived in 1978 with the intention of teaching for just one year but , thanks in part to Professor Keeley’s generosity, remains on the faculty today.
At the time, scholarship on Greece at Princeton was confined to the past and centered in the Classical Department. Beginning in the 1970s, Professor Keeley built what became the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, now one of the leading institutions of its kind in the country.
Through the center, he invited Greek artists and scholars to visit the United States and took numerous students on trips to Athens and the surrounding area, standing at the front of the tour bus, microphone in hand, lecturing on his favorite Greek poets.
“It would be fair to say that he has been America’s foremost cultural ambassador to Greece for the past half-century,” Dimitri Gondicas, who now heads the center, said in a telephone interview.
Professor Keeley’s interest in Greece has always been shaped by his family’s relationship with it. He was long dogged by rumors that his father, as an American diplomat, had played a part in the country’s efforts to quell left-wing dissent. His guilt was most likely the basis for his presidency of PEN America.
After retiring from both Princeton and PEN America, he took up writing full-time. He had already written several novels and he wrote several more – eight in all, most of them set in Greece and revolving around the theme of foreigners coming into contact with Greek culture.
He also took poetry. One of his last works was “Daylight”, which appeared in The Hudson Review last year. A meditation on the Covid pandemic, which reads in part:
Why not leave it all to Nemesis?
And take a long walk outside
Whichever direction the prospect is held
Of your restorative things to remember
Of those lighter years in open spaces
That coasts next to an endless sea.