Tom Plummer
Thomas G. Plummer was a retired professor of German language and literature and an author. He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Plummer grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and married Louise Roos in 1964. A few years later they headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he earned his master’s and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Minnesota for several years before he moved on to teach at Brigham Young University in 1985. He chaired the humanities department a year after joining the BYU faculty.
He began writing after he and his wife, author Louise Plummer, were teaching a memoir and imagination class and he felt uncomfortable encouraging his students to write when he hadn’t written a personal essay himself. Since then he has written Eating Chocolates and Dancing in the Kitchen: Sketches of Marriage and Family (1998), Don’t Bite Me, I’m Santa Claus (1999), Second Wind: Variations on a Theme of Growing Older, and Waltzing to a Different Strummer (2002). He has also written the widely read essay “Diagnosing and Treating the Ophelia Syndrome.”
Both Plummer and his wife taught at BYU for many years. After their retirement, they directed a BYU study abroad program in Vienna. He has also pursued photography, painting, and collage.
The Plummers are the parents of four sons. He passed away on March 5, 2023.
