Auslander, Joseph (11 October 1897–22 June 1965), poet, editor, and translator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Louis Auslander and Martha Asyueck. He attended Columbia University from 1914 to 1915, then transferred to Harvard, receiving his B.A. in 1917. In 1919 he became an instructor in English at Harvard. He pursued graduate studies there until 1924, with the interruption of one year (1921–1922) at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he went on a Parker Traveling Fellowship. His poetry began to appear in national magazines in 1919, and his first volume, ...
Article
Auslander, Joseph (11 October 1897–22 June 1965), poet, editor, and translator
Richard Boudreau
Article
Child, Francis James (1825-1896), philologist and editor
Benjamin Franklin
Child, Francis James (01 February 1825–11 September 1896), philologist and editor, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Child, a sailmaker, and Mary James. After attending the Boston Latin School, he matriculated at Harvard College; he ranked first in his class and was elected class orator. Following his graduation in 1846, he became a tutor in mathematics at his alma mater and then, in 1848, in history and political economy. Also in 1848 he published his edition of ...
Article
Coggeshall, William Turner (1824-1867), journalist, state librarian, and diplomat
Leigh Johnsen
Coggeshall, William Turner (06 September 1824–02 August 1867), journalist, state librarian, and diplomat, was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, the son of William C. Coggeshall, a coachsmith, and Eliza Grotz. At the age of eighteen he headed west and settled in Akron, Ohio. There he launched his career by starting the ...
Article
Edmands, John (1820-1915), librarian
Martin J. Manning
Edmands, John (01 February 1820–17 October 1915), librarian, was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, the son of Jonathan Edmands and Lucy Nourse, farmers. Edmands attended a district school six months of the year until he was sixteen and then began a five-year apprenticeship to a carpenter. He entered Phillips Academy at Andover in 1841 and graduated in 1843, when he entered Yale College. In 1845–1846 Edmands, a junior, was assistant librarian of one of the three college literary societies, the Brothers in Unity. The literary societies maintained circulating libraries to supplement the rather limited collection in the college library. These were installed in wings near the college library. In return, the society libraries agreed to faculty supervision. A society librarian was an honorary position held by a senior who was elected by the members; each librarian had assistants from the lower classes. One of a society librarian’s duties was to help the members research debates and theses. After their move to a new library building, the three society librarians compiled up-to-date catalogs of their holdings. When Edmands was a junior, he compiled, with Samuel Richards, Yale’s first dictionary catalog under the supervision of Yale librarian Edward C. Herrick. The catalog was published without author credit in April 1846. This edition was larger and better organized than the Brothers’ previous catalog (1838)....
Article
Gassner, John Waldhorn (1903-1967), critic, educator, and author
Daniel S. Krempel
Gassner, John Waldhorn (30 January 1903–02 April 1967), critic, educator, and author, was born in Szeged, Hungary, the son of Abraham Gassner, a furrier, and Fanny Weinburger. Until age eight he was educated at home while the family moved to Budapest, Vienna, and Rotterdam, emigrating to the United States in 1911....
Article
Griswold, William McCrillis (1853-1899), librarian, bibliographer, and indexer
Richard Hollinger
Griswold, William McCrillis (09 October 1853–03 August 1899), librarian, bibliographer, and indexer, was born in Bangor, Maine, the son of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a minister, editor, and writer, and Harriet Stanley McCrillis. Griswold was raised in Bangor, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1871, and attended Harvard University from 1871 to 1875. After graduating from Harvard he traveled in Europe for several years. In 1882 he married Anne Deering Merrill, with whom he had four children....
Article
Hakluyt, Richard (1552-1616), British geographer and anthologist of travel literature
Arthur F. Kinney
Hakluyt, Richard (1552–23 November 1616), British geographer and anthologist of travel literature, was born in London, the son of a merchant father, orphaned at five, and reared by his uncle (the names of his parents and uncle are not known). He was descended from the Welsh Hakluyts of Herefordshire, whose family seat was Eaton, near Leominster. Richard was a queen’s scholar at Westminster school; during that period he visited his namesake, a cousin twenty years his elder, at Middle Temple, where he was introduced to “certeine bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe” and the Bible, and felt an immediate passion for “that knowledge and kinde of literature.” He entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1570 and after earning his M.A. in 1577 began to give there the first public lectures in England on geography, lectures that “shewed both the old imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed Mappes, Globes, Spheares and other instruments of this Art.” He also began a lifetime of voracious reading of “whatsoever printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant either in the Greeke, Latine, Italian, Spanish, Portugall, French, or English languages.”...
Article
Hart, James D. (1911-1990), author, editor and college and library administrator
Michelle M. Pagni
Hart, James D. (18 April 1911–23 July 1990), author, editor and college and library administrator, was born James David Hart in San Francisco, California, the son of Julien Hart, the owner of a silk company, and Helen Neustadter. He grew up in San Francisco, where his mother died when he was ten. He received his degrees in English: an A.B. from Stanford University in 1932, and an M.A. (1933) and Ph.D. (1936) from Harvard University. Before moving back to his native state, Hart taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for one semester. He then became an instructor of English at the University of California at Berkeley from 1936 to 1941; he later became assistant professor (1941–1947), associate professor (1947–1951), and finally professor, a position he held for thirty-nine years. Hart served as department chairman twice, from 1955 to 1957 and 1965 to 1969 and as vice chancellor of the university from 1957 to 1960....
Article
Weeks, Stephen Beauregard (1865-1918), historian, bibliographer, and collector
John David Smith
Weeks, Stephen Beauregard (02 February 1865–03 May 1918), historian, bibliographer, and collector, was born near Nixonton, Pasquotank County, North Carolina, the son of James Elliott Weeks, a planter, and Mary Louisa Mullen. His parents died when he was a small child, and Weeks was raised by his father’s sister and her husband, Robertson Jackson....