Background

Archibald Henderson was born on July 17, 1877, in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was the son of John Steele and Elizabeth (Brownrigg Cain) Henderson.

Education

Henderson was taught early on to respect the life of the scholar. He began his educational career at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as a mathematics major, and his graduate degrees were in that field as well. Possessed of strong intellectual appetite, he did not view the attainment of the Ph.D. as the end to his education, and while on faculty at his alma mater, he spent the summer of 1903 at the University of Chicago to continue his studies.

Career

For fifty years Henderson was a member of the Department of Mathematics at Chapel Hill - he received a doctorate in 1902, became a full professor in 1908, succeeded his uncle, Dr. William Cain, as department head in 1920, and was appointed Kenan Professor in 1925, serving until his retirement in 1948. Under his direction, the mathematics department expanded enormously, increasing the graduate program, adding (to a curriculum largely designed for engineers) extensive opportunities in pure mathematics, and acquiring a departmental library that is among the best in the South.

Henderson was a prolific writer on scientific topics. His Twenty-seven Lines Upon the Cubic Surface (1911), completed during a year of study at Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and the University of Berlin, was the first American book included in the prestigious series of Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. It was also the first volume on the subject and for over thirty years the only one.

About 1920 he became interested in Einstein's theory of relativity and within two years was writing articles about it. The year 1923-24, he spent on sabbatical, studying at Cambridge and the University of Berlin where he came to know Einstein personally. Henderson collaborated with J. W. Lasley, Jr., and A. W. Hobbs on a textbook, The Theory of Relativity, published in 1924.

The breadth and depth of his learning were made available not only to the scientific community but also to students, who found him a skillful and challenging teacher. Because he had the true teacher's wish to make pure science intelligible to the layman, Henderson wrote more than 750 brief articles on scientific subjects which were syndicated in Hearst newspapers.

Henderson's interest in theater neither started nor ended with Shaw. He had published articles on Maurice Maeterlinck before he discovered Shaw, and to those he added, over the years, evaluations of Ibsen, Hauptmann, Rostand, Wilde, Strindberg, and many others of many lands. Most noted were two books, European Dramatists (1913) and The Changing Drama (1914), both recognizing the international theatrical revolt that followed the work of Ibsen.

From its beginning in 1918, the drama department at Chapel Hill found Henderson an ally and a collaborator. In several articles, he demonstrated an optimism about the future of American drama before most people had noticed its past. He wrote about early drama and entertainment in North Carolina, collected American plays, composed a foreword for Frederick Koch's anthology of Carolina Folk Comedies, and edited and contributed to the Carolina Play-Book.

On the ship that carried Henderson to England for his first meeting with Shaw, a fellow passenger was Mark Twain. The two men formed a friendship, out of which were born several articles by Henderson and a complete biography, Mark Twain (1911). Again, a general interest in fiction had preceded the meeting with a great writer, for Henderson had already written about George Meredith. He was also drawn to regional writers, like Frances Christine Fisher Tierman ("Christian Reid") of Salisbury.

Achievements

• Archibald Henderson’s greatest public recognition derives from his extraordinary biographical works on British writer George Bernard Shaw, but these works are only a small part of his total contribution to American letters. His scholarship was wide-ranging, taking up subjects as diverse as relativity theory (he was once a student of Einstein’s) to the history of the Old South, to a textbook for teaching geometry. Even in the field of literary biography, his scholarship was not limited to Shavian subjects - he wrote important books on August Strindberg and Mark Twain, compiled a bibliography of the works of Bjomstjem Bjomson, and many others.
  
  His chief historical works included The Conquest of the Old Southwest (1920), concerning westward expansion into Kentucky and Tennessee (in which his forebear was involved); Washington's Southern Tour (1923); and North Carolina: The Old North State and the New (1941), for which he wrote two volumes of history to be followed by three volumes of biographies composed by various persons. The last work was praised by historians for its attention to cultural development as well as economic and political matters. In 1949, he wrote about The University of North Carolina in The Campus of the First State University. At various times over a period of years, he wrote nearly 150 short pieces on state history for North Carolina newspapers.
  
  Besides his four earned degrees, he held honorary degrees from the University of the South, Tulane, the College of William and Mary, Oglethorpe, Catawba, and his alma mater. On his seventy-fifth birthday, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the first American to be so honored.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Is Bernard Shaw a Dramatist?

    (A Scientific, But Imaginary Symposium In The Neo-Socratic...)

    1929
  • The Twenty-Seven Lines upon the Cubic Surface 1911
  • Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit 1911
  • Mark Twain 1911
  • George Bernard Shaw His Life and Works 1911
  • Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet 1932
  • George Bernard Shaw: Man of the century 1956
  • European Dramatists 1913
  • The Changing Drama: Contributions and Tendencies 1914

Politics

Although a Jeffersonian Democrat, Henderson wrote little of a political nature. But he did advocate in print, at least as early as 1910, extending the franchise to women.

Views

The pure science of Henderson's first love was, of course, without boundary; in the "thought movements" of the second, he was consistently both internationalist and regionalist.

Quotations: "Mathematics and the allied sciences of physics and astronomy have absorbed my fullest interest through some fifty years of my life. Concurrently with these scientific studies ran another deep and abiding impulse: the passion for a grasp and mastery of some of the leading thought movements of the time, especially in literature, drama, history and philosophy."

Personality

Archibald Henderson was a man of astonishingly varied virtuosity and undeniable genius. Genial and sociable, he was a frequent and sought-after public speaker and, during much of his life, an enthusiastic sportsman, participating in tennis, baseball, and hiking.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  tennis, baseball, hiking

Connections

Archibald Henderson married Minna “Barbara” Curtis Bynum, in 1903. They had five children: Mary Curtis, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Barbara Gray, Archibald, John Steele.

Father:

John Steele Henderson

Mother:

Elizabeth (Brownrigg Cain) Henderson

Wife:

Minna “Barbara” Curtis Bynum

Daughter:

Mary Curtis Henderson

Daughter:

Elizabeth Brownrigg Henderson

Daughter:

Barbara Gray Henderson

Son:

Archibald Henderson

Son:

John Steele Henderson

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision, Vol. 103
  1981
• Archibald Henderson, the New Crichton: A Composite Portrait, Authorized
  1946
• Archibald Henderson Excerpt from Archibald Henderson To 'the Conquest of the Old Southwest.' Copyright, The Century Company, and used here by permission of author and publishers.
  1923