Articles by Department: Vita

Although he died almost seven years ago, Edward Gorey ’50 has just brought out a new book. Amphigorey Again, the fourth anthology of…

As a pianist, conductor, and composer, Ludwig van Beethoven was the most famous musician in music-crazy early-nineteenth-century Europe. He also…

Those whove heard of Zane Grey usually identify him as the author of best-selling westerns, but few realize that he was the commercially most…

There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of…

Splendiferous in his purple Russian blouse, with shaggy hair and beard, Hervey White, A.B. 1894, helped transform a tiny village in the…

Francis James Child, A.B. 1846, was a model of nineteenth-century academic achievement. Named Harvard’s Boylston professor of rhetoric and…

When a group of Radcliffe students in the early 1960s complained to Mary Ingraham Bunting about the Harvard English department’s…

When Samuel Williston, A.B. 1882, LL.B.-A.M. ’88, died at the age of 101, Time magazine took notice, describing his enormous influence on…

During a football game in 1904, William Clarence Matthews, the sole African-American player on the Harvard squad, sat on the bench while the…

To a forensic investigator, trivial details can reveal transgressive acts. Consider the card Frances Glessner Lee carried in her later years…

By the time Elizabeth Bishop settled into her apartment on the Boston waterfront, in recently refurbished Lewis Wharf, it was 1974. She was 63…

Anne Bradstreet’s poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” a favorite at weddings, is one of the most anthologized examples of…

Ninety years ago in what is now Malawi, a tall, asthmatic, American-trained Baptist preacher attempted bravely, in the manner of John Brown at…

By today’s standards, Harvard College before the Civil War was a provincial academy, competent (judged Henry Adams) at preparing students to…

When Benning Wentworth, A.B. 1715, retired as royal governor of New Hampshire in the summer of 1767, he was one of the richest men in New…