Harland Nelson, age 101, of Decorah, Iowa, passed away on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, at Barthell Eastern Star Home in Decorah, Iowa.

A memorial service is planned for 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, November 24, 2026, at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church 701 Iowa Ave, Decorah, Iowa 52101, with Pastor Kristen Larsen-Schmidt presiding. 

Visitation will be from 10:00 a.m. until the time of the service at the church. 

Memorials may be given to the Harland and Corinne Nelson Scholarship Fund at Luther College, the Corinne Nelson Endowment Fund for Landscaping at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, or the charity of your choice. With appreciation for the kindness of the gesture, the family prefers not to receive flowers.

Harland Stanley Nelson was born August 11, 1925, at Hawley, Minnesota, the son of Hartvig Nelson and Selma Mabel Solum Nelson. In the spring of 1926, his parents moved to his maternal great-grandparents’ homestead eight miles east of Barnesville in Tansem township of Clay County, the farm where he and his two brothers Duane (born 1931) and Curtis (born 1936) grew up. The family’s church home was nearby Rollag Lutheran Church, for three generations the home congregation for nearly all the numerous Nelson clan.

Harland Nelson graduated from Barnesville High School as valedictorian of the class of 1943. He continued working on the family farm until February 1944, when he entered the Army Air Force and qualified for flying officer training, serving at bases in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico until being discharged in October 1945. He enrolled at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, in February 1946 and graduated with the B.A. degree as class salutatorian in 1949.

He earned the M.A. degree in English at Washington State University in 1951. After teaching two years at the University of Missouri at Columbia he moved to Minneapolis, where (after a brief interlude as a technical writer for Honeywell) he became assistant to the director of public relations for the Evangelical Lutheran Church (formerly the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America and now part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

There he met Corinne Lois Rye, daughter of Martin and Marie (Sletten) Rye of rural Irene, South Dakota, a graduate of Augustana Academy in Canton, South Dakota, and the University of Minnesota. They were married in December 1954. Corinne enabled his return to graduate school in 1955 by working as an executive secretary at the mechanical division of General Mills. Harland received the Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Minnesota in 1959.

He taught at the University of Connecticut in Storrs 1959-62 and accepted an appointment in the Luther College English department in Decorah, Iowa, beginning in the fall of 1962. He taught there until his retirement in 1992, except for two years as Fulbright professor of American literature: 1967-68 at the University of Bergen in Norway, and 1972-73 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. During his tenure at Luther he served in several administrative posts, as director of freshman English, as chair of the department, and as director of the Consortium on Agriculture and the Liberal Arts, a cooperative program funded by the Kellogg Foundation at four Iowa liberal arts colleges: Coe, Cornell, Grinnell, and Luther.

Harland published a book (Charles Dickens, 1981) as well as articles and film reviews in professional journals. He was a member of several professional societies. In 1985 he was appointed Research Fellow at the Victorian Studies Center of the University of Leicester in England. He was listed in The Directory of American Scholars beginning in 1969 and in Who’s Who in America beginning in 2000.

Active in community affairs, he represented Luther College in the Decorah Betterment Association for several years. The Nelsons joined Decorah Lutheran Church in 1962; Harland served on the Luce-Bergeson Committee of Decorah Lutheran Church for eight years, and on the stewardship committee of the church council for six years, serving as president of the council and congregation in 2001. In 2009 Harland and Corinne became members of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Decorah. The two of them belonged to associations in support of the arts, the Decorah Public Library, Habitat for Humanity, the Porter House Museum, Vesterheim, and Winneshiek County history, as well as contributing regularly to such causes as the Nordic Fest and the United Way.

Harland is survived by the children of his and Corinne’s marriage, and their families: Hilary Nelson of West Lafayette, IN; Sarah Nelson and Tim Gresback of Moscow, ID; and Catherine Mizell-Nelson of New Orleans, LA; five grandchildren: Haley and Linnea Nelson, Luke Gresback, and Keely and Arlo Mizell. He is also survived by his sister-in-law Ella Magstadt (Corinne’s sister) and by many nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, and even some great-grandnieces and great-grandnephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, his wife Corinne, who died June 30, 2017, his brothers Curtis and Duane and their wives, and his son-in-law Michael Mizell-Nelson.