M. Thomas Inge (March 18, 1936 – May 15, 2021) was an American academic. He was the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph–Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he taught, edited, and wrote about Southern literature and culture, American humor and comic art, film and animation, Asian literature, and William Faulkner. Early life A native of Newport News, Virginia, he received his B.A. degree in English and Spanish from Randolph-Macon in 1959 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Vanderbilt University in 1960 and 1964 respectively. Career Inge taught at Michigan State University and then chaired the English departments at Virginia Commonwealth University and Clemson University. As a senior Fulbright Lecturer, Inge taught at the University of Salamanca in Spain (1967–68), at three institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1971), at Moscow State University in the former Soviet Union (1979), and at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic (1994). As Resident Scholar in American Studies with the US Information Agency, a part of the State Department, he lectured and did diplomatic work in eighteen countries from 1982 to 1984, earning a commendation for distinguished work in the Soviet Union. Inge authored or edited over sixty books and has been a pioneer in the development of popular culture as a legitimate field of academic study. He was one of the founders of the Popular Culture Association. His three-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture was cited by the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work in 1979 and has been issued in revised and expanded editions in 1989 and 2002. Publications include William Faulkner: Overlook Illustrated Lives (2006), The Incredible Mr. Poe: Comic Book Adaptations of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (2008), New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 9: Literature (2008), My Life with Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz (2010), and The Dixie Limited: Writers on Faulkner and His Influence (spring 2016). The Society for the Study of Southern Literature gave him the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Contributions to Southern Letters in 2008. He founded the journal, Resources for American Literary Study, in 1971 and the Southern Studies Forum of the European Association for American Studies in 1995. Inge was also one of the founders of the American Humor Studies Association and served for four years as Editor of its journal, Studies in American Humor. His work on humor includes editions of Sut Lovingood’s Yarns by