Gilbert highet biography

Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian.
Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian.
Gilbert Highet (1906–78), regarded in his day as the most celebrated Classical scholar in America.

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Collection: Gilbert Highet

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a middle-class family. He showed an early facility with Latin and Greek, reading Homer, Virgil, and Aeschylus for pleasure by the time he was sixteen. He attended Glasgow University, and later Oxford’s Balliol College, sweeping up most of the available prizes and scholarships along the way. In 1937 Highet joined the faculty of Columbia University, becoming a full professor at thirty-one. He taught at Columbia until 1972 (with the exception of a period during WWII, when he was stationed as an officer in Washington, D.C. and later assisted in the return of looted goods in Europe), becoming a legend for his animated and inspiring lectures. A very public intellectual, Highet served on the boards of Horizon magazine (1958–77) and the Book-of-the-Month Club (1954–78), was chief literary critic for Harper’s (1952–54), and hosted a cultural affairs radio program, People, Places, and Books (1952–59), that was broadcast on more than three hundred stations in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Highet

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IN PRAISE OF GILBERT HIGHET BY LINDSAY JOHNS

Last month saw the publication of the first ever biography of one of my intellectual heroes, a veritable titan of 20th century classical scholarship and letters - the Oxford and Columbia University classicist, broadcaster and public intellectual Gilbert Highet (1906 - 1978).

Author of such magisterial tomes as The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), The Art of Teaching (1950), People, Places and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), Juvenal The Satirist (1954), Man’s Unconquerable Mind (1954), The Migration of Ideas (1954), Poets In A Landscape (1957), Talents and Geniuses (1957), Explorations (1971) and The Immortal Profession (1976), Highet did more to popularise Classics, a devotion to the life of the mind and an appreciation of the joys of literature than quite possibly any other academic or intellectual on either side of the Atlantic.

As an undergraduate with a penchant for Classics, I remember finding a copy of his magnum opusThe Classical Tradition in a

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The Incomparable Gilbert Highet

Thomas Couture, The Romans and their Decadence, credit Wikipedia

R.J.Ball, The Classical Legacy of Gilbert Highet, Lockwood Press, 2021. Pp. I-IVI; 1-104. $34.95, reviewed by Darrell Sutton

Great scholars need biographers to tell their stories, to disclose information that would not be made available otherwise. In recent times, publicized accounts of the lives of classical scholars have appeared every so often, exposing their lifestyles and fecund minds to exhaustive but narrow analyses in the broader discipline of wissenschaftsgeschichte, a burgeoning field of study. Historians recover suppressed truths. They search musty attics, rummage through second-hand bookstores, explore letters/diaries in archives, and inspect files in squalid library basements. The profit is usually worth it, with the benefits outweighing the drawbacks.

Gossip and scandal are rarely far from an academic’s life. Gilbert Highet, however, a noted classicist, was an exception. Well-dressed, decorous, and refined in his speech, he stood out among the professors o