The work updated an 18-volume series on the same subject that was published in 1808 by Sir Walter Scott, best known for his historical novel "Ivanhoe."

The "California Dryden" as it became known, is the most complete collection of Dryden's works in existence, said Alan Roper, one of about 18 scholars who contributed to the project over the years. It includes the full text of all Dryden's poems, plays and prose. Scott abbreviated some works and left out others, Roper said.

The new edition also includes extensive, modern commentaries and expanded annotation, said Roper, a retired professor of English at UCLA.

Dearing joined the group as a text editor, helping to identify the most authoritative version of each poem and prose piece from among existing early versions.

In "A Manual of Textual Analysis" (1959), he explained the technical process he used to select an original manuscript. He updated his book in 1974 and developed a computer program that flags the variations among similar texts, which is one painstaking step in analyzing them.

For the last years of the Dryden project, Dearing was the sole editor. He did fundraising as well as editing and writing commentary for the final four volumes.

"He said he'd made a commitment and he'd see it through," Roper recalled.

Dearing once explained his interest in Dryden. More than a poet and playwright, he was the man who standardized the sentence structure of written English.

In the 17th century, some scholars, including the poet John Milton, argued that written English ought to imitate Latin, with the verb at the end of the sentence.

"Dryden thought that written English ought to do what spoken English did: begin a sentence with its subject followed by the verb and the object," Dearing told The Times in 2002. "As far as I'm concerned, he was the source of how we write prose today."