Background
Paul Elmer More was born on December 12, 1864, at St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
Paul Elmer More was born on December 12, 1864, at St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
More was educated at Washington University and at Harvard.
He taught Sanskrit at Harvard (1894 - 1895) and Bryn Mawr (1895 - 1897) before retiring from academic life to Shelburne, New Hampshire. Later he returned to serve successively as literary editor of the Independent (1901 - 1903), the New York Evening Post (1903 - 1909), and the Nation (1909 - 1914). After 1914 he moved to Princeton, where he resided, lecturing on philosophy and the Classics, until his death March 9, 1937. His literary criticism, chiefly represented in the Shelburne Essays series (1904 - 1928), is erudite, urbane, and authoritative; but in later years his interest turned principally to the exposition of ethical idealism in such books as The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934), The Catholic Faith (1931), and On Being Human (1936). With Irving Babbitt he was a leader of the New Humanism movement in American criticism. Stuart Sherman accurately characterized his influence: "If W. D. Howells was the dean of our fiction, Mr. More is the bishop of our criticism. "
(Book by More, Paul Elmer)