John Y. Simon, at 75; edited volumes of Grant's letters

NEW YORK - John Y. Simon, a Civil War scholar whose mammoth effort in editing of the papers of Ulysses S. Grant created a new standard for the organization of historical documents, died July 8 in Carbondale, Ill. He was 75.

His wife of 51 years, Harriet Simon, confirmed his death.

For 34 years, Dr. Simon was on the history faculty of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, teaching courses on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the history of Illinois. But his true vocation was the Grant papers project, comprising thousands of documents and annotations, which he began in 1962 and which was nearing completion at his death.

Dr. Simon had published 28 volumes, with numbers 29 and 30 scheduled for release next year by Southern Illinois University Press; a supplemental volume and an annotated edition of Grant's memoirs were to follow.

The volumes helped cement Grant's place as a literary memoirist and not just a war diarist. But perhaps more important, said Harold Holzer, an Abraham Lincoln scholar and a senior vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they changed the nature of documentary editing, bringing the perspective of a biographer rather than a cataloger to the enterprise.

"He changed the whole ethos of presidential papers," Holzer said in an interview Wednesday. "He matched incoming correspondence with outgoing, so researchers would have a complete episode. He included editorial commentary that was more substantial than footnotes. He wrote introductions to each volume. They're a model for the Jefferson papers, the Wilson papers; he's the father of this whole discipline."

John Younker Simon was born in Highland Park, Ill., outside Chicago, on June 25, 1933. His father was a banker. He graduated from Swarthmore College and received master's and doctoral degrees, both in history, from Harvard, where he met his future wife. He taught at Ohio State before he found a home at Southern Illinois in 1964.

In addition to his wife, he leaves a sister, Barbara Stuart of Deerfield, Ill.; a daughter, Ellen Roundtree of Buffalo Grove, Ill.; and two grandchildren.

Beyond the Grant papers, for which he was awarded a Lincoln Prize in 2004, Dr. Simon wrote or edited a number of other books dealing with Lincoln, Grant, and the Civil War and dozens of journal articles on subjects of wide variance in 19th-century American history. The Grant project consumed him, though. He worked on it every day, his wife said.