Carroll B. Johnson, a longtime UCLA Spanish professor and one of the world's premier authorities on 17th-century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes and his novel "Don Quixote," died Tuesday, April 3, at Resurrection Hospital in Chicago following a stroke.

Johnson, 69, had delivered a lecture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was on his way back to Los Angeles when he collapsed. His family was with him when he died.

Johnson is renowned for dragging Cervantes' famous Man of La Mancha - sometimes kicking and screaming - into the 20th century. His Freudian and Marxist interpretations of "Don Quixote" initially caused stirs in academic circles but eventually were embraced as orthodoxy.

"Carroll was perhaps the best known Cervantista in the world, active and engaged in every aspect of the profession," said Susan Plann, a fellow professor in the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese. "His unique approach to Cervantine studies often shocked fellow scholars, but with each publication he opened new fields of inquiry, as others first debated and then eventually followed his lead."

Johnson served from 1997 to 2000 as president of the Cervantes Society of America, the leading professional organization in Cervantes studies in the United States. He also served as an editor of the society's journal, Cervantes, recognized as the world's leading scholarly publication in the field.

"To say that he was one of the most interesting, and consistently innovative, critics of Cervantes and his Golden Age contemporaries is a mighty understatement," said E. Michael Gerli, Commonwealth Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Virginia. "Carroll fashioned a brilliant career out of forging new approaches to the Spanish 17th century."

In 2005, Johnson presided over a monthlong celebration at UCLA of the 400th anniversary of the publication of "Don Quixote." At the time, the university's Academic Senate gave him the highest honor the UCLA faculty can give a peer: He was selected to deliver UCLA's 98th Faculty Research Lecture.

Tall and wiry, Johnson even looked the part. Especially as he aged, the scholar got a kick out of being told how much he physically resembled the addled hidalgo who believed himself to be a knight.

"I look like everybody's idea of Don Quixote - tall and thin and middle-aged," he once said. "I think it's cute."

But Johnson almost missed his calling. In a 2005 interview, he said he started studying Spanish only to fulfill a language requirement at his South Pasadena junior high school.

When he later enrolled at UCLA as an undergraduate in 1955, Spanish wasn't his first choice as a major. But after growing disenchanted with international relations, he switched to Spanish, figuring he would spend four years mastering ever finer points of the language's grammar.

"I was just appalled when I realized I'd signed up for a Spanish lit major," he admitted. "Frankly, I don't think I'm a very good role model."

But Johnson soon made up for his inauspicious beginnings. After earning a Ph.D. at Harvard and serving for two years as a teaching fellow there, he joined UCLA's faculty in 1964, where he stayed for 43 years. He served as Spanish department chair on three separate occasions, for an unprecedented 13 years, and was scheduled to retire at the end of this year's spring quarter.

Students enjoyed the way Johnson found glimmers of "Don Quixote" in such unusual places as Larry McMurtry's western novels and the 1969 movie "Midnight Cowboy." He also supported department outreach efforts to the community, organizing and teaching courses in Spanish for the clergy and helping high school Spanish teachers improve their skills.

"Carroll insisted that as a department of Spanish located in Los Angeles, we had a special obligation to the Latino community," Plann said.

Through it all, Johnson's constant companion was the protagonist from the novel said to be the second best-selling book of all time, behind the Bible.

"I think there are only a few books that lend themselves to so many interpretations," he said. "People talk about Cervantes in the same breath as Shakespeare because both had incredibly powerful intuitions about humanity."

In the early 1980s, Johnson ruffled feathers with one of the earliest examples of Freudian analysis of the character of Don Quixote. Undergoing psychoanalysis himself, Johnson argued that the nobleman, living alone with his comely 20-year-old niece at the beginning of the novel, was experiencing a midlife crisis, confounded by unconscious incestuous impulses.

"It got me in a lot of trouble - it really did," Johnson said of his 1983 book, "Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote." "But now the interpretation is
orthodoxy."

In his latest book, "Cervantes and the Material World" (2000), he showed how the novel opens a window onto the real socioeconomic tensions of Cervantes' era, particularly as they related to women.

"Johnson consistently produced some of the most insightful and groundbreaking studies in his field," said Anne J. Cruz, a Spanish professor at the University of Miami.

Johnson's 2005 faculty lecture explored links between the novel and the Morisco, or Spanish Moorish, culture of the late Spanish Renaissance. He was working on a book about the topic and planned to learn Arabic after retiring.

"The official version of Spanish literature - especially the one that emanated from General Franco's Spanish government - is that there's nobody here but us Christians," Johnson said. "But all the great writing of the Golden Age is a reflection of the age's ethnic tensions."

Johnson is survived by his wife of 36 years, Linda Leslie Johnson, who earned a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of Spanish and Portuguese and teaches at a private school in Santa Monica; his daughter Amy Johnson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and his son-in-law David Nunnery, also a doctoral candidate at Wisconsin.

Plans are pending for a memorial service on campus. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made in Johnson's memory to either of the following two organizations: The Partnership Scholars (www.partnershipscholars.org), and for Modern Language Association members, the Scholars at Risk Network (http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.edu), c/o New York University, 194 Mercer Street, Room 410, New York, NY 10012; phone: (212) 998-2179.

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