Professor

Biography

Born Augustin Nicholas Ruiz de Santayana y Borais on December 16, 1863, George Santayana was raised for eight years in Avila before moving with his family to America. He lived in Boston and was educated at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1889 with his doctorate and joined its faculty. After the publication of his The Life of Reason (1905-06), Santayana became a full professor, but he reputedly left the university in 1912, following his mother's death, because of administrative uneasiness about his unmarried state and his enjoyment of the company of young men. For the rest of his life, centered in Rome, he wandered through Europe as a man of letters. Very early in his academic career, Santayana published several volumes of poems, but his great success came as a philosopher, critic, and novelist. He died in Rome in 1952 and is buried in the Panteon de la Obra Pia espanola in Campo Verano Cemetery.

 

  • Santayana, George. Sonnets and Other Verses. Cambridge, Mass. and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894. Enlarged edition: New York: Stone and Kimball, 1896.
  • --. A Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems. New York: Scribners, 1901.
  • --. Poems: Selected by the Author and Revised. New York: Scribners, 1923.
  • --. The Poet's Testament: Poems and Two Plays. Ed. John Hall Wheelock and Daniel Cory. New York: Scribners, 1953.
Biography

After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Joseph Warren Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired. An expert in many literary figures -- Henry James, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and nineteenth-century literature in general -- Beach had a special love for poetry. His The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a masterful study of how Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. Beach also brought out two volumes of his own poetry, Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903) and Involuntary Witness (1950). By his first wife, Elisabeth Northrop (1871-1917, m. 1907), he had two sons, Northrop (1912-) and Warren (1914-). His second wife was Dagmar Doneghy, who married him in 1918. His brief life in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, 47 (1965): 596-97, tells us that outdoor camping was an important part of his life. His letters and papers are in the Library of Congress.

Biography

Thomas Henry Huxley, the great Victorian scientist, "Darwin's bulldog," was born in Ealing on May 4, 1825. Despite having only two years of formal schooling, he obtained his M.B. at London University in 1845. This led to a posting as a naval surgeon with H.M.S. Rattlesnake on a surveying voyage to Australia from 1846 to 1850. Research undertaken on this trip led to anatomical papers on the hydrozoa and medusae that were rewarded when he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. In 1854, Huxley left the navy and joined the Royal School of Mines in London as lecturer in natural history. He married an Australian, Henrietta Anne Heathorn, in July 1855. His lifelong defence of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species began in 1859 with an article in The Times. He became Hunterian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons (1863-69) and Fullerian professor at the Royal Institution (1863-67), President of the Royal Society (1881), and recipient of the Copley Medal (1888) and the Darwin Medal (1894). Huxley authored two popular textbooks, Elementary Lessons in Physiology (1866) and, with H. N. Martin, Elementary Biology (1875), that put both disciplines on firm scientific grounds. Among his greatest achievements are nine volumes of essays. To his great credit, Huxley championed curiosity-based scientific research and argued that the core of higher education consisted, not of technical subjects, but of science, literature, art, history, and philosophy. Bad health caused Huxley to retire in 1885 and to leave London for Eastbourne in 1890. He died June 29, 1895, at Eastbourne from kidney disease and was survived by his wife, two sons, and four daughters. Huxley was interred at Finchley and St. Marylebone Cemetery.

  • Huxley, Leonard. The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1900. QH 31 .H9A4 1900 Gerstein Library
  • W., W.F.R. "Huxley, Thomas Henry." The Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. Vol. XXII: Supplement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921-22. 894-903. Poems of Henrietta A. Huxley with Three of Thomas Henry Huxley. London: Duckworth, 1913. 9700.d.1043 Cambridge University Library
Biography

William Herbert Carruth, born on April 5, 1859, near Osawatomie, Kansas, received his B.A. in modern languages at the University of Kansas (1880), studied at the Universities of Berlin and Munich, and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1889, 1893). He served as Professor of Modern Languages and then German at the University of Kansas throughout his life. His many academic publications in German studies included textbooks, editions, and translations. In 1908 G. P. Putnam's Sons published his Each in his own Tongue and Other Poems, titled after a poem that first appeared about the turn of the century in the New England Magazine and that very quickly became internationally celebrated. In June 1882, Carruth married Frances Schlegel, who served as Professor of Modern Languages at Kansas until her death in 1908. They had one daughter. On June 10, 1910, he married Katherine Kent Morton. Carruth died in 1924.

Biography

James Joseph was born on Sept. 3, 1814, to Abraham Joseph Sylvester and was a Jew. Educated at the Royal Institution School, Liverpool, he proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he earned the coveted Second Wrangler in mathematics in 1837. Unable to swear to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church, however, Sylvester was barred from obtaining a degree. Still, he earned the post of Professor of Natural Philosophy at University College, London, on Nov. 25, 1837. Single all his life, and dedicated more to public research than to regular teaching, Sylvester led a restless academic life. Appointed as Professor of Mathematics, University of Virginia, 1841, the year he obtained an M.A. degree from the University of Dublin, he resigned soon after, in March 1842, evidently because of an altercation with a student who had insulted him, and returned to England to work at Equity and Law Life Assurance Company from 1845 to 1855. He was called to the Bar in 1850. His next post was as Professor of Mathematics, Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, from 1855 to 1870. During this stint he became President of the London Mathematical Society and of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association. Sylvester again left academe, this time with just one book to his name, The Laws of Verse (1870), which he practiced with as marked originality and flare as he did the analysis of numbers. His finest poem, "Kepler's Apostrophe," movingly expresses the fierce unrepentance of any free-thinking researcher. Sylvester lived unemployed in London until 1877, when Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore engaged him as Professor of Mathematics. In America he founded the American Journal of Mathematics. By 1883 he left Baltimore to become Savilian Professor of Geometry at New College, Oxford University, until his retirement in 1894. Among the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century, Sylvester founded invariant algebra. He died on March 15, 1897, and was interred in the Jewish Cemetery, Ball's Pond, London.

 

  • Fauvel, John. "James Joseph Sylvester: Poet." De Morgan Association Newsletter 5 (1997): 5-7.
  • Parshall, Karen Hunger. James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. QA 29 .S95P37 1998 Mathematical Sciences Library
  • --. "Sylvester, James Joseph (1814–1897)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
  • M., P. E., and E. B. E. "Sylvester, James Joseph." Dictionary of National Biography. 258-29.
  • Sylvester, James Joseph. The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester. Ed. H. F. Baker. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904-12. QA 3 .S87 Gerstein Library
  • --. The Laws of Verse; or, Principles of versification exemplified in metrical translations, together with an annotated reprint of the inaugural presidential address to the mathematical and physical section of the British Association at Exeter. London: Longmans, 1870. LaE.Gr. S985k Robarts Library
Biography

James Clerk Maxwell was born on Nov. 13, 1831, at 14 India St., Edinburgh, to John Clerk Maxwell and Frances Cay. The family home to which he would at last retire was at Glenlair, but after his mother's death young James was sent to Edinburgh for schooling at the Edinburgh Academy, from 1840 to 1847. He excelled at both English and mathematics. His education continued at the University of Edinburgh (1847-50) and Peterhouse College in the University of Cambridge (1850-54), which graduated him as Second Wrangler. After several years as a fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, lecturing on hydrostatics and optics, Maxwell took a position as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, for two years (1856-57). Katherine Mary Dewar and he wed there in June 1858, and then Maxwell became Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London. They lived at 8 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington. He retired to Glenlair from 1866 to 1870 after suffering from erysipelas, but returned to academe on March 8, 1871, when he assumed the Chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge. Here Maxwell brought out his greatest works, Theory of Heat (1871), Electricity and Magnetism (1873), and Matter and Motion (1876), but he also helped design and supervised the erection of the Cavendish Laboratory. Throughout his life, Maxwell loved English poetry and committed much of it to memory. He wrote poems himself, which were collected and published by his friend Lewis Campbell in 1882. He evidently sang the most well-known, his homage to Burns' "Comin thro' the Rye," while playing a guitar. The scientist who created one of the most famous of thought experiments, "Maxwell's demon" (which made entropy understandable to the un-numbered), died a Christian on Nov. 5, 1879.

  • Campbell, Lewis. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, with a Selection from his Correspondence and Occasional Writings and a Sketch of his Contributions to Science. London: Macmillan, 1882. QC 16 M4C3 Gerstein
  • Goldman, Martin. The Demon in the Aether: the Story of James Clerk Maxwell. Edinburgh: Harris, 1983. QC 16 M4G75 1983 Gerstein
  • Maxwell, James Clerk. A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. With an appreciation by Albert Einstein. Ed. Thomas F. Torrance. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982. QC 665 E4M39 Gerstein Library
  • --. Matter and Motion. New York: Dover, 1952.
  • --. Maxwell on Molecules and Gases. Ed. Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, and C.W.F. Everitt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. QC 16 .M4A4 1986 Gerstein
  • --. The Scientific Papers. Ed. W.D. Niven. Cambridge: University Press, 1890. 2 vol. S M4653s Gerstein Library
  • --. Theory of Heat. Ed. Lord Rayleigh. London: Longmans, 1899. Physics Thermodyn M Gerstein Library
  • --. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881. 2 vols. QC 518 M47 1881 Engineering Library
  • --, ed. The Electrical Researches of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, written between 1771 and 1781. Cambridge: University Press, 1879. QC 517 C35 1879 Gerstein Library
  • Tolstoy, Ivan. James Clerk Maxwell, a Biography. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981. QC 16 M4T6 Gerstein
Biography

Born September 5, 1861, Walter Alexander Raleigh received his education at the City of London School, Edinburgh Academy, University College London, and King's College Cambridge. His academic appointments were as Professor of English Literature at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh (1885-87), Professor of Modern Literature at the University College Liverpool (1890-1900), Chair of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University (1900-1904), and Chair of English Literature at Oxford (1904-22). Until 1914, when he turned to the war as his subject, Raleigh published works on many major English authors. His finest book may be the first volume of The War in the Air (1922). He died from typhoid (contracted during a visit to the Near East) on May 13, 1922, survived by his wife Lucie Gertrude and their four sons and one daughter. His son Hilary edited his light prose, verse, and plays in Laughter from a Cloud (1923).

  • Jones, Henry Albert. Sir Walter Raleigh and the air history, a personal recollection. London: E. Arnold, 1922. D 602 .R342J6 Robarts Library
  • Raleigh, Walter Alexander. Robert Louis Stevenson. London: E. Arnold, 1895. end S749 Z6R33 1895 Fisher Rare Book Library. See www.netLibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summar.
  • --. England and the war, being sundry addresses delivered during the war and now first collected. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918. HMod R1634e Robarts Library
  • --. The English novel; a short sketch of its history from the earliest times to the appearance of Waverley. London: J. Murray, 1919. PR 821 .R2 1919 Robarts Library
  • --. The English voyages of the sixteenth century. Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie, 1926. G 242 .R35 1926 Robarts Library
  • --. Laughter from a cloud. Preface by Hilary Raleigh. London: Constable, 1923. PR 6035 .A4L3 Robarts Library
  • --. The letters (1879-1922). 2nd edn. Ed. Lady Raleigh. London: Methuen, 1928. CT/R138 Victoria College Library
  • --. The meaning of a University; an inaugural address delivered to the students of University College, Aberystwyth on the 20th of October, 1911. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Educat. Univ. O Robarts Library
  • --. Milton. London: E. Arnold, 1900. PR 3581 .R3 St. Michael's College Library
  • --. On writing and writers, by Walter Raleigh; being extracts from his note-books. London: E. Arnold, 1926. PR 99 .R34 Robarts Library
  • --. Poetry and fact : an inaugural address delivered at University College, Liverpool, March 13th, 1890. Liverpool: H. Young, 1890. PN 1031 .R34 Robarts Library
  • --. Romance: two lectures delivered at Princeton University, May 4th and 5th, 1915. Princeton: University Press, 1916. PR 447 .R37 1916 Robarts Library
  • --. Samuel Johnson: lecture delivered Cambridge, 22 February, 1907. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Pam/PR/J637Ra Victoria College Library
  • --. Shakespeare. London: Macmillan, 1909. PR 2894 .R3 1909 Robarts Library
  • --. Six essays on Johnson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. PR 3533 .R35 Robarts Library
  • --. Some authors: a collection of literary essays, 1896-1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1923. PN 511 .R3 Victoria College Library
  • --. Some gains of the war; an address to the Royal Colonial Institute delivered Feb. 13, 1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918. Pamph HMod R Robarts Library
  • --. The study of English literature. Glasgow: Maclehose, 1900. Pamph LE R Robarts Library
  • --. Style. 3rd edn. London: Edward Arnold, 1898. PN 203 .R2 1898 Robarts Library. See www.netLibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summar
  • --. The war in the air; being the story of the part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922-37. D 602 .R34 Robarts Library
  • --. The war of ideas: an address to the Royal colonial institute, delivered Dec. 12, 1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917. D 525 .R3 Robarts Library
  • --. Wordsworth. London: E. Arnold, 1903. PR 5881 .R27 1903 Victoria College Library
  • --. Shakespeare's England: an account of the life and manners of his age. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916. PR 2910 .S5 1916 Victoria College Library
  • Smith, D. Nichol. "Raleigh, Sir Walter Alexander." Dictionary of National Biography 1922-1937. 701-04.
Biography

Born November 10, 1852, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and educated in theology at Brooklyn Polytechnic, Princeton, and Berlin, Henry Van Dyke worked twenty years as a minister, first in Newport, Rhode Island, from 1879 to 1883 and next in New York until 1899. His Christmas sermons, his essays, and his short stories made him a popular writer. His poems reveal a classical education as well as a common touch in matters of faith. He became Professor of English Literature at Princeton in 1900. During World War I he acted as American Minister to the Netherlands (913-16) and then naval chaplain, for which he was awarded the Legion of Honour. He died April 10, 1933.

  • Buggeln, John D. "van Dyke, Henry." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • Van Dyke, Tertius. Henry Van Dyke; a biography, by his son. New York: Harper 1935. PS 3118 .V3 Robarts Library.
Biography

Moore's career was academic: born in New York, he took a B.A. from Columbia University in 1798 and from 1823 to 1850 was Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, whose site he in fact donated for the college. His Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language was published in 1809, but his fame came from a ballad that he said that he wrote in 1822 for his two daughters, Margaret and Charity, but that was anonymously published a year later. Martin Gardner describes the great affection Moore obtained for a poem, "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas," that he claimed, deceptively, as his own in his collected Poems in 1844:

Every year, in late December, a Clement Clarke Moore Christmas Commemoration is held in the Church of the Intercession at Broadway and 155th Street in uptown Manhattan. After the candlelight service, at which Moore's ballad is read, there is a lantern procession, with luck through snow, to Moore's grave across the street. (The Annotated Night Before Christmas, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Summit Books, 1991; PS 2429 M5Z 54 1991 Robarts Library).

Moore was buried in the Trinity Church cemetery at 155th Street and Amsterdam Ave. The 1990 commemoration was the 79th. In 2000, Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, obtained external and internal evidence that clearly showed that Moore could not have been the author of that poem. Instead, it probably was the work of Major Henry Livingston, Jr., and that Moore had written another, and almost forgotten, Christmas piece, "Old Santeclaus." Foster's detection of this misattribution appears in his Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000): 221-75.

Biography

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807, and was educated at Portland Academy and alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard University. He taught at Bowdoin from 1829 to 1835 as a professor of foreign languages after travelling widely in Europe 1826-29, and he joined Harvard as Smith Professor of French and Spanish in 1836 (replacing George Ticknor) and taught there until 1854, when the professorship went to James Russell Lowell. He was married twice, his first wife dying in Holland in 1835, and his second, Frances Appleton (whom he married in 1843), dying in a burning accident at home in 1861 when Longfellow himself was injured. While at Harvard, the Longfellows lived at Craigie House, a gift of his father-in-law. He had three daughters and two sons. Longfellow's first book of poems, Voices of the Night, was published in 1839, and his last, In the Harbor, in 1882. Between those two dates, Longfellow published more than 20 books:

  • Hyperion, a prose romance (1839)
  • Ballads and Other Poems (1842)
  • Poems on Slavery (1842)
  • The Spanish Student (1843)
  • The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1846)
  • Evangeline (1847)
  • Kavagh, a story in prose (1849)
  • The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)
  • The Golden Legend (1851)
  • The Song of Hiawatha (1855)
  • The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)
  • Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863)
  • Dante's Divine Comedy, a translation (1865-67)
  • Flower-de-Luce (1867)
  • The Divine Tragedy (1871)
  • Christus, a Mystery (1872)
  • Three Books of Song (1872)
  • Aftermath (1873)
  • The Masque of Pandora (1875)
  • Kéamos and Other Poems (1878)
  • Ultima Thule (1880)

In 1842 Longfellow visited Dickens in London, and his 1868-69 tour of Europe included honorary degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, by which time he had become as universally popular a poet as Tennyson. A bust was placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey after his death, the only American to be afforded this honour. For two good lives, see Newton Arvin's Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963) and Edward Wagenknecht's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; PS 2281 W34 Robarts Library).