Nancy Packer, Melvin and Bill Lane professor emerita of humanities and former English professor at Stanford, died on April 1 after battling Alzheimer’s disease. Packer was 99 years old, one month short of her 100th birthday.

Packer’s journey at Stanford began in 1957, when she moved to California after her husband, Herbert Packer, joined the law school faculty.

Packer was awarded a fellowship to study at Stanford under American novelist, writer, environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner in 1959. Packer was soon named a professor of English and creative writing in 1968, teaching until 1993. From 1989 to 1993, Packer also directed the creative writing program.

Nicholas Jenkins, an associate professor of English, wrote in an email to the creative writing community and English faculty that Packer was an “iconic figure” in the history of the University’s creative writing program, which Jenkins currently directs.

As a professor, Packer is remembered for her inspirational presence. Over three decades of teaching, her students’ “luminous reputations testify to the strength of her insight and her generous encouragement,” Jenkins wrote.

Ryan Harty, a student of Packer’s in the Stegner Fellowship workshop, wrote to The Daily that “she was insightful and encouraging” and “a generous human being.”

“At the first class meeting I could see students weren’t sure what to expect, but as soon as she started talking about our work, we knew we were in good hands,” Harty wrote. “Her comments on my stories were always spot-on; in office hours she could always find ways for students to get to the heart of the story… I’ll never forget how she encouraged me when I was a young writer.”

Packer’s first publication was a short story in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, entitled “Povera Baby.” Writing collections of short stories appearing in the Kenyon Review, Yale Review and beyond, Packer also wrote informative handbooks on writing.

In each piece, Packer wrote with integrity, imagination and dedication, with a “bare, translucent literary style that she characterized as ‘no fancy dancing,’” Jenkins wrote in the email.

George Packer, her son, described his mother’s support after his father passed away in 1972. “She liked to say, I’m not a very good mother, but I’m a damn good father,” Packer said. “And that was sort of her relation to me: she had to play the role of a stand-in father as well as a mother.”

Above all, Packer is remembered for her direct and honest demeanor, oftentimes humorous, shown in both her writing and her personality.

“Nancy Packer people at Stanford remember will not be the young protege of Wallace Stegner… or the wife of Herbert Packer… but rather this widow who was on her own and was the most independent, self-reliant, fiercely determined woman I’ve ever known, and with an incredible wit and sense of humor and a great talent for friendship,” Packer said of his mother.

“But also no BS. If you came to my mother as a student, or a friend, or a son with a line of BS, she would let you know it right away,” he said.

William Chace, honorary professor of English emeritus said he found Packer to be “a delightful and charming, intelligent, but most of all a very truthful person.”

“That is, in conversation, sooner or later she would say something that would embarrass you by its directness, by its lack of fancy phrasing, but it was never meant to hurt,” Chace said. “It was never meant to damage. It was never meant to harm anyone. It was simply Nancy, the writer, as if she were writing a story describing a person.” 

Packer remembered once bringing his mother a piece of his youthful writing: poetry inspired by “The Romantic Poets.”

“Those were traumatic experiences,” he said. “I came away just bruised… She read it and said, ‘I don’t want you to write like this. I want you to write more like T.S. Eliot.’”

Chace told The Daily that Packer “did not conceive of herself as a professor, did not conceive of herself as an academician. She conceived of herself as a writer, particularly of short stories, of which she was simply wonderful.”

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the date of Nancy Packer’s death. The Daily regrets this error.