In early 1987, the irascible and authoritarian college basketball coach Bobby Knight called Temple University looking for Joan Mellen, an English professor and the author of “Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film.”
Mr. Knight was fuming about “Season on the Brink,” a recent best-selling biography by the sportswriter John Feinstein that portrayed him as vulgar, sexist and out of control. Professor Mellen had just reviewed the book for The St. Petersburg Times, faulting it for misunderstanding its subject.
“Knight is, above all, a teacher,” she wrote. “Aggressively he gives his all. In this he is no different from the dedicated English or math teacher. The basketball players, like all students, are recalcitrant. They fight against learning. Knight’s advantage over other teachers lies in his access and control.”
On the phone, Mr. Knight was charming.
“You’re a professor of literature?” Professor Mellen later recalled him asking her. “I just wanted to tell you I really liked what you wrote.”
Professor Mellen began compulsively watching his games. She arranged to write a profile of him for The New York Times, which she later expanded into a best seller of her own: “Bob Knight: His Own Man.”
That unlikely pairing of author and subject typified Professor Mellen’s peripatetic intellectual tastes. Her 25 books included several on Japanese cinema; biographies of Marilyn Monroe, the Southern novelist Kay Boyle and the Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel; a novel; and investigations into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“How many people do I know who could talk knowledgeably about Luis Buñuel, Bobby Knight or Lyndon Johnson?” Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and Kennedy assassination investigator, wrote on his Substack, JFK Facts. “I think only one: Joan.”
Professor Mellen died on June 30 at her home in Pennington, N.J. She was 83. Her death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by Audrey Szepinski, a former student who was her research assistant for many years.
Though she was never widely known, Professor Mellen was an authoritative, inquisitive and frequently combative participant in whatever intellectual territory she wandered through.
“She was very confrontational in general, and she was proud of that,” Ms. Szepinski said in an interview. “She always encouraged us to fight back, even about the tiniest of things. She was a tough professor, but you respected her.”
In Bobby Knight, she found a kindred spirit.
“Judge him not by what you read, or by the persona viewed on television (the wire services have people at his games solely to photograph him at moments of anger), but perhaps by the fact that in the last five minutes of a game his students are less likely to make mistakes than those of other coaches,” Professor Mellen wrote. “It’s their grace under pressure that’s at issue, not his.”
Sportswriters read her biography as an attack on Mr. Feinstein and rose to his defense.
“Even Mr. Knight should be embarrassed by this attempt to deify him,” the sportswriter Rick Telander wrote in The Times Book Review. “A complex, intelligent, honest, vulgar, troubling man, he both fascinates and repels many fans, mostly because they believe he could be so much better than he is, a hero rather than just an intimidating winner.”
Professor Mellen’s response was vintage Professor Mellen.
She castigated The Times in a letter to the editor, saying that Mr. Telander should not have reviewed her book because he worked for Sports Illustrated, which had published several negative articles about Mr. Knight. He was among the writers who had criticized the coach.
“Such breaches of journalistic ethics on the part of some sportswriters are a central theme of my book,” Professor Mellen wrote. “My focus, however, was Mr. Knight as a teacher, a topic not touched upon once by Mr. Telander, who is obviously adhering to some other agenda.”
The Times published an Editors’ Note saying that Mr. Telander should not have been chosen to review the book.
Joan Spivack was born on Sept. 7, 1941, in the Bronx to Louis and Norma (Wieder) Spivack. Her father was a cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed lawyer with whom she was never close.
She graduated from Hunter College in 1962 and later received her master’s and doctoral degrees in English from the City University of New York.
In 1966, the year before she joined the Temple faculty, she married James Mellen. They divorced the next year. Two years after that, she married Ralph Schoenman, a prominent left-wing activist who worked as a secretary for the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She and Mr. Schoenman were together for 13 years and, after divorcing, remained close friends until he died in 2023.
To Professor Mellen, he was as much an intellectual partner as a romantic one.
“For Ralph, the world was not a place to be feared, but encountered,” she wrote on her website after his death. “It was Ralph’s credo, you had to speak up, take a stand, be heard. Life was not worth living otherwise. You might lose, a prospect Ralph never entertained on any subject, but, then again, you might win.”
Professor Mellen’s early books were devoted to film. They included “Filmguide to ‘The Battle of Algiers’” (1973), “Marilyn Monroe” (1973), “Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film” (1974) and “The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema” (1976). Critics praised her work.
“Mellen is an extremely well-informed critic, and she is neither politically nor cinematically naïve,” the novelist Larry McMurtry wrote in his review of “Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film” for The Washington Post, adding that it was “easily the best of the several recent books about the treatment of women in films.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Professor Mellen wrote a succession of biographies, beginning in 1982 with “Privilege: The Enigma of Sasha Bruce,” about the slain daughter of the American diplomat David K. E. Bruce, and including “Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett” (1996).
In 2005, she published “A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History.” That book scrutinized the findings of the Warren Commission’s investigation into Kennedy’s death, an effort she called “bunk.”
Though she claimed that operatives connected to the C.I.A. had framed Lee Harvey Oswald, Professor Mellen wasn’t considered a conspiracy theorist among the tight-knit group of investigators who continue to examine the case.
“She was a real scholar and a formidable one,” Mr. Morley said in an interview. “She brought a different way of looking at things. Sometimes she attacked you. But once you got to know Joan, you realized that’s just how she was. She did that to a lot of people who were her good friends.”
Professor Mellen left no immediate survivors.
In her last book, “Sherlock Being Catfished” (2024), she confronted herself, asking how she — of all people — fell victim to a Facebook romance scam.
“My life’s work as a nonfiction writer involved intrepid investigation and dogged research,” she wrote. “It might have saved me. But it didn’t.”
She was lonely — an easy mark for the man who called himself Devlin.
“I am in love with the imaginary Devlin,” Professor Mellen wrote. “He loves the ocean, he told me with genuine enthusiasm. He looks forward to life. I am not far behind, as he waits for me at the edge of the sea. The air between us sparkles with light and joy.”
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