Marion K. Stocking collection

Born Marion Kingston on June 4, 1922, daughter of William Frank and Louise Schucholz Kingston, she grew up north of Boston, graduating from Melrose High School in 1939, having been one of the founders of the school newspaper, The Imprint. In summers she served as a New Hampshire camp counselor in nature studies, hiking and mountain climbing. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1943 as Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in English Composition, magna cum laude. She married David Stocking, a fellow Beloit College English professor, in 1955.

In 1954 Professor Bink Noll, a former Colorado colleague, notified her of an opening to teach the Romantic Period and composition at Beloit College. She applied for and received an appointment as Assistant Professor, despite some hostility to a tenure-track woman in their department from some of the all-male senior faculty. On arriving at Beloit she immediately was welcomed to the board of the Beloit Poetry Journal (then considered a college publication) and was assigned to direct the new Freshman English course.

Marion was active in the creation of the General Honors (interdepartmental) Porter Scholars Program, which she directed in 1961-66.

In addition Marion was from her first year on the faculty member of Publications Board and the Library Committee, especially happy to be involved in the design of the new library. She also enjoyed work on the Field Term Committee when the year-round calendar enabled it as a graduation requirement.

For thirty years Marion was as teacher and administrator a champion of the arts and sciences. Her promotion to Associate Professor came promptly in 1959 and to Professor in 1965. In addition to her Porter Scholars courses, she taught the "Romantic Revolution," Modern British and Irish Literature," and the "Beowulf-to-Virginia-Woolf" introductory course. In composition, she crated a non-fiction course, "Writing toward Publication," which included a springboard into journalism. She also taught "Introduction to Creative Writing" and occasionally an advanced poetry-writing seminar, as well as directing many Independent Study courses and English Honors theses. She also designed and taught senior English major seminars on the Don Juan legend, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and the Frankenstein/Prometheus theme. She especially enjoyed a Porter Scholars course she called "Roots and Branches" for which she authored a brief handbook—Academic Writing: The Minimum Essentials (1978). This was an elementary writing course with weekly papers based on the readings of the original Freshman English, from the Bhagavad Gita, through Plato and Sophocles to Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein.

As department chair, she drew on a Mellon Foundation grant to poll all past English majors. Publication in 1976 summarizing their subsequent careers revealed the value of a liberal education: most found their true careers within ten years of graduation, careers in a broad range of contemporary fields, many of which were not yet imagined when they were at Beloit.

Both David and Marion Stocking retired from Beloit College in 1984. Marion Stocking passed away in 2009.