NORMAN J. ENDICOTT (1902-1979)

CO-EDITOR 1935

Norman J. Endicott was born in 1902 in Kiating, China, the son of the Rev. James Endicott, well-known as the Foreign Mission Secretary of the Methodist Church of Canada, and Sarah Diamond. They immigrated to Canada in 1910. Norman Endicott's education began in Toronto at Oakwood Collegiate Institute and continued at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where he took a B.A. degree in English and History in 1924. Winning a Rhodes Scholarship that year, Endicott spent the next three years at St. John's College, Oxford, where he obtained a B.Litt. He married Kathleen Elizabeth Elliott in New York on June 22, 1928, and joined the English Department at University College in 1929, where he was to remain until 1970. Endicott devoted much of his career to teaching. From 1935, when he took over (from Herbert Davis) the editing of the first volume of Representative Poetry, to 1959-60, when he used his skills to persuade the Department to produce the sixth and last edition, Endicott shepherded the textbook through many reprints and revisions. His major scholarly research waited until the verge of his retirement. In 1967 he brought out an edition of The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne: Religio medici, Hydriotaphia, The garden of Cyrus, A letter to a friend, Christian morals. With selections from Pseudodoxia epidemica, Miscellany tracts, and from MS notebooks, and Letters from Anchor Books. His death came in 1979. One of his legacies to education is his fine collection of first editions of English poetry that he donated to the University's Rare Book Library.

 

SELECTED SOURCES FOR ENDICOTT'S CAREER

  • University Archives A73-0026/096 (89).