Ola Elizabeth Winslow

Background

Ola E. Winslow was born on January 5, 1885 in Grant City, Missouri, one of three children of William Delos Winslow, a local banker, and Hattie Elizabeth Colby.

Education

Winslow matriculated at Stanford University in 1903 and received her B. A. degree in 1906.

Career

She taught English in private preparatory schools in San Francisco from 1907 to 1911, when William W. Guth, president of the College (now the University) of the Pacific, hired her as an English instructor. The following year Winslow became assistant professor of English; she continued in that capacity until 1914, when she earned her M. A. at Stanford. In September 1913, Guth assumed the presidency of Goucher College in Baltimore and a year later hired his protégée to chair the small English department at the all-female school, a post Winslow would hold for thirty years. Winslow was elevated to assistant professor in 1917.

In 1919, after controversy erupted over the appointment of a man to replace retiring dean Eleanor Lord, President Guth compromised with angry faculty and students by naming Winslow assistant dean, a position she held until 1921. In 1920, Winslow was promoted to associate professor of English. While in Baltimore, Winslow began doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University and spent her summers between 1916 and 1922 at the University of Chicago, where she worked under noted English literature scholar John Matthews Manly. Winslow produced a dissertation entitled "Low Comedy as a Structural Element in English Drama from the Beginnings to 1642, " and earned her Ph. D. from Chicago magna cum laude in August 1922.

Meanwhile, Winslow continued to teach both English and American literature at Goucher, and between 1941 and 1943 she even developed and taught a course in cryptography for the United States Navy. Many years of research at Yale University libraries led to Winslow's publication of Jonathan Edwards, 1703 - 1758 (1940), one of three books she produced while at Goucher. A committee chaired by noted journalist Burton J. Hendrick agreed and unanimously awarded Winslow's work the Pulitzer Prize for biography for 1941.

Winslow left Goucher in 1944 to take a one-year visiting professorship in English at Wellesley College. She was to assume the teaching duties of two professors who had gone on leave, one an Americanist and the other an English literature specialist; Winslow was chosen because of her expertise in both areas. Within the year Wellesley accepted Winslow as a permanent part of the faculty, assigning her primarily to American literature classes. At the same time Winslow served on an English department committee responsible for faculty evaluation, promotion, and tenure. Though by all accounts an excellent teacher, Winslow soon tired of her role as educator. She asked for and received an appointment as research professor for the 1949 - 1950 academic year, retiring from Wellesley in the spring of 1950 with the rank of professor of English emeritus. Winslow's years in retirement were her most productive.

Between 1950 and 1962 she spent her winters on the English faculty of the Radcliffe College Seminars. She lived most of the year in her house near Sheepscot, Maine, where she continued to write. Winslow also kept a humble, sparsely furnished Boston apartment during these years and devoted her winter days to research in various area libraries. Her later researches produced no fewer than ten books, all of which were historical or biographical, including Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783 (1952), Master Roger Williams (1957), Samuel Sewall of Boston (1964), Portsmouth, the Life of a Town (1966), John Eliot: Apostle to the Indians (1968), Old South Church (1970), and A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox (1974).

Winslow also lived and worked in England at various times; one four-month research period in particular resulted in yet another biography, John Bunyan (1961). Her interests in later life shifted from teaching to research, from literature to biography and history. She remained productive well into her eighties and had contracts with three publishers at the time of her death on September 27, 1977, at Miles Memorial Hospital in Damariscotta, Maine, at the age of ninety-two.

Achievements

• Ola Elizabeth Winslow was a prominent colonial historian, who wrote a number of biographies and other historical works. Ola E. Winslow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for the biography of the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards.

Works

More photos

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  • Portsmouth: The life of a town

    (The story of Portsmouth with deep-felt sympathy,capturing...)

  • Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783 (Norton Library)

    ( “The ‘Meetinghouse,’ in the hands of Miss Winslow, is a...)

  • Master Roger Williams,: A biography

    (This book is about life of Roger Williams written by Ola ...)

  • Jonathan Edwards: 1703-1758

    (Jonathan Edwards: 1703-1758 Paperback Jan 01, 1961 Winslo...)

  • Samuel Sewall of Boston

    (Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, Samuel Sewall Of Boston)

  • John Eliot, apostle to the Indians

    (Second printing. Biography of John Eliot 1604-1690 , who,...)

  • American broadside verse from imprints of the 17th & 18th centuries
  • John Bunyan
  • Harper's Literary Museum: Early American Writings
  • A destroying angel;: The conquest of smallpox in colonial Boston

Personality

Rather, Ola E. Winslow was the perfect picture of the solitary, serious, prodigious, and careful scholar.

Connections

Ola Elizabeth Winslow never married and had no children.

Father:

William Delos Winslow

Mother:

Hattie Elizabeth Winslow (Colby)

Brother:

Ross Colby Winslow