Lawrence Babb

Background

Lawrence Babb was born on December 1, 1902, in Columbia, Missouri, United States.

Education

Babb obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Missouri during the 1920s and then earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature from Yale University in 1933.

Career

Babb joined the faculty of Michigan State University, in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1939 as an instructor, and stayed there as a professor of English, eventually retiring in 1972.

Babb’s first book, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642, was published by Michigan State University Press in 1951. It was followed by three other scholarly works, all of them focusing on the English literature of the first half of the seventeenth century. His second book was Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1959), which was reprinted in 1977 by Greenwood Press.

Six years later, he edited a critical edition of selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy for Michigan State University.

Babb's final full-length study was The Moral Cosmos of Paradise Lost (1970).

He also contributed numerous essays to the scholarly journals.

Works

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  • Sanity In Bedlam: A Study Of Robert Burton's Anatomy Of Melancholy 1959
  • Elizabethan Malady: a Study of Melancholia in English Literature From 1580 to 1642 1951
  • The Moral Cosmos of Paradise Lost 1970