ARTHUR A. COPPOTELLI ’55
ARTHUR A. COPPOTELLI ’55, a former instructor at Wesleyan, and a freelance writer, teacher and translator, died Mar. 5, 2015. He was 81. A member of Alpha Chi Rho, he received his degree with honors. He served in the U.S. Army and then received a master’s degree from Yale University in English Language and Literature. From 1968 through 1980 he lived in Italy, where he taught English literature and cinema for programs sponsored by Wesleyan, Trinity College, and Temple University, including the College of Letters at Wesleyan. He wrote dialogue and collaborated on numerous American-Italian movies, including on the movies Medea and Magdalen with Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was the European fiction editor for Playboy magazine, translated the poems and books of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and translated Landscape Painting in the 19thCentury for the New York Graphic Society. During the course of his career, he was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, where he authored the proposal for the youth training corps used in President Kennedy’s State of the Union address. He was also an instructor of English and humanities at Wesleyan from 1965 to 1968, where he founded the Italian program. He served as European editor for Hawthorn Books, overseeing a major dictionary and encyclopedia project for Lateran University, and held numerous editorial and writing positions with the Architecture Research Institute and Hacker Art Books. Survivors include his great-grandnephew, Alex Coppotelli. His partner, Joan Dunlop, died in 2012.