Background
William Pitt Preble Longfellow was born n 1836 at Portland, Maine, United States.
William Pitt Preble Longfellow was born n 1836 at Portland, Maine, United States.
He graduated at Harvard with the class of 1855. Having decided upon a professional career, the young man completed a course of technical study at the Lawrence Scientific School at Cambridge, and under the late E. C. Cabot, early architect in Boston, received a practical training.
About 1860 Mr. Longfellow established an office in Boston, but remained in private practice for less than a decade. In 1869 he was appointed Assistant to the Supervising Architect of the U. S. Treasury and moved to Washington to take up his work. At the end of three years, however, Mr. Longfellow resigned and re-opened his office in Boston, where he carried on work until 1881. During that year he accepted an invitaton to become Professor of Architectural Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and while he taught there made his home in Cambridge.
In later years Mr. Longfellow devoted his time almost exclusively to writing, and prepared articles on architectural history for a number of books. The best known of these was the standard textbook, "Cyclopedia of Architecture in Italy, Greece and the Levant”, first published in 1891.