Nancy Huddleston Packer, the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, Emerita, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), a feted author, and an award-winning campus leader, died April 1, 2025. She was 99.
Known for her penetrating prose and her charisma in the classroom, she earned two prestigious O. Henry Awards for her writing, which spanned short stories and memoir. She was also a committed member of the Stanford community.
“Nancy was an iconic figure in the history of Stanford Creative Writing,” said Nicholas Jenkins, director of the Creative Writing Program and associate professor of English. “No one who met her will ever forget the inspirational power of her presence or her piercing sense of humor. But, most of all, it is as a unique writer that we will remember her. She had a bare, translucent literary style that she characterized as ‘no fancy dancing.’ Nancy set an example not just for those who knew her during her years of service at the university or for those who are at Stanford now. Her remarkable life, books, and career will resonate into the future, too.”
Prized teacher and author
Packer first came to Stanford after marrying her husband, law professor Herbert L. Packer. She took a creative writing class from Wallace Stegner, alongside notable classmates including Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry, and then became a Stegner Fellow and a Jones lecturer. She began her permanent teaching career after the last-minute withdrawal of another writer: Philip Roth.
She taught for 30 years, earning two education honors: the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education (1976-77) and the H&S Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (1984-85). In addition to teaching, she was director of the Creative Writing Program (1989–1993) and served two terms in the Faculty Senate, a legislative body co-founded by her husband when he was Stanford’s vice provost for academic planning and programs. After her retirement in 1993, she maintained her relationship with the university, earning the Stanford Alumni Association’s Richard W. Lyman Award for exceptional volunteer service (2000).
Among her former students is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, whom she influenced greatly.
“Fiction, as taught by Professor Packer, came blazingly to life,” Cunningham said. “She had a rare ability to convey fiction’s depths, its complexities, and its sense of humor, among other qualities. She revealed it, certainly to me, as the vital, urgently important art form that it is. She literally opened a portal into another world. I started writing fiction myself. I hoped, initially, to write something Professor Packer would take seriously. Some fifty years later, I’m still hoping to write something Professor Packer would take seriously.”
As an author, she produced a wide variety of writing across seven books, including the memoir In My Father’s House: Tales of an Unconformable Man (1988, John Daniels & Co.), which chronicled her childhood in Alabama and Washington, D.C., as the daughter of a U.S. Congressman. Her short stories appeared in Harper’s, Epoch, and Sewanee Review and were anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She also twice served on the selection committee for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as a member in 1995 and as the chair in 2002.
Nancy Packer speaks at the memorial for former Stanford President Richard W. Lyman in 2012. | L.A. Cicero
A political upbringing
Born in 1925 and raised primarily in Birmingham, Alabama, Packer grew up in a political family – her father and later her brother represented her hometown in Congress. In a 2014 Stanford oral history, she said this brought several privileges: “armloads of books” from the congressional library, Easter egg rolls on the White House lawn, and the ability to telephone her father on the floor of Congress if her brothers were picking on her at home.
She graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in 1945 and earned a master’s degree in theology from the University of Chicago in 1947.
She met her husband in 1956 through a friend of her father’s. At the time, Herbert Packer was on his way to Stanford to begin his academic appointment at the law school. The couple married in 1958, and she moved to Palo Alto to join him.
One work she never got around to writing: a full autobiography. In the oral history, she joked that the title would have been a word that defined much of her life – serendipity. “I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister, and I’m somebody’s wife,” she said. “Am I somebody?” As this obituary makes clear, the answer is an emphatic yes.
She is survived by a daughter, Ann Packer, and a son, George Packer. Like their mom, both are writers.
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This story was originally published by Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.