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He was born on January 2, 1865 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the fifth and youngest child (the third son to attain maturity) of the Rev. Sylvanus Dryden Phelps and his wife, Sophia Emilia Lyon Linsley. William received the name of his mother's grandfather, who had been a colonel during the American Revolution. His father, a direct descendant of William Phelps, who settled in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1636, was a graduate of Brown University.
"Billy" Phelps, as nearly everyone styled him (his parents called him "Willie" and he himself preferred "Bil"), received most of his early education in the public schools of New Haven, Providence, and Hartford. In adolescence he began to read voraciously. He was active in all kinds of athletic sports and did well in all subjects except mathematics, which he always spoke of as the bane of an otherwise happy childhood and youth.
Phelps entered Yale in 1883, was a member of the second baseball nine, played tennis, and won a championship in the cross-country run. He was elected to the board of the Yale Literary Magazine and to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with special honors in English and philosophy. During 1887-88 he continued at Yale as general secretary of the Y. M. C. A. and part-time graduate student.
After spending a happy summer in a cycling tour of England and the Continent, he entered the Harvard graduate school with a scholarship in the autumn of 1890 and received the A. M. degree from Harvard and the Ph. D. from Yale on the same day, in June 1891.
All told, he received honorary degrees from nineteen colleges or universities, beginning with Brown and Colgate in 1921 and including New York University (1927) and Columbia (1933).
he taught English and coached athletics at the Westminster School, Dobbs Ferry, New York, returning to Yale, 1889-90. After a year as instructor in English at Harvard, he returned to Yale as instructor in the autumn of 1892.
His innovations roused alarm and hostility in the faculty, but he was made professor in 1901. Though he taught all literature with delight, he accepted the philosophy of Browning as his own and was best known at Yale for his course in Tennyson and Browning ("T & B"). After publishing his dissertation, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (1893), he invested his writing time for several years in editing authors from Shakespeare to Ibsen. With Essays on Modern Novelists (1910) he found the mode that gave him greatest satisfaction.
Having begun his career as a public lecturer in 1895, he soon found himself the most sought-after speaker on literature in the country, not only giving many single discourses, but also conducting annual courses of lectures in New Haven, New York, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia.
For some thirty-five years he served as president of the Little Theater Guild of New Haven, and from 1912 to 1935 was president of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Having been a licensed occasional preacher since 1887, he assumed complete summer charge, beginning in 1922, of the Methodist church in Huron City, Michigan. On December 16, 1928, he was ordained honorary pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New Haven, of which he had long been a deacon, and after that occasionally officiated at weddings and funerals.
World War I made Phelps again a center of controversy. In 1922 he began his favorite piece of writing, the monthly series of causeries in Scribner's Magazine called "As I Like It". In 1924, while in Paris on sabbatical, Phelps suffered a severe depression and nervous breakdown and spent four months convalescing in Augusta, Georgia. Whatever the cause of this illness, his recovery seemed complete.
He began a syndicated weekly newspaper column in 1927. He gained his greatest newspaper publicity in 1928 by bringing his friend James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney, the prizefighter, to lecture on Shakespeare to his class at Yale.
On retiring from teaching (July 1, 1933), Phelps began a series of radio addresses (and a column on books for the Rotarian) and stepped up his syndicated newspaper column from a weekly to a daily. Mrs. Phelps's death in March 1939 broke the pattern of his life, but he continued his accustomed social routine with outward serenity.
He died four years later, of pneumonia following a cerebral hemorrhage, at his home in New Haven.
William Lyon Phelps served on the Yale University faculty for forty-one years, teaching an average of four hundred students a year. He also taught the first American university course on the modern novel, did much to establish the primacy of literature over language in graduate study. Phelps pioneered in making Russian fiction known in America. He received Franklin Medal from the American Philosophical Society in 1937.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Favorite subjects were the modern novel, the modern theatre, and the King James Version of the Bible.
His approach to literature was that of an unashamed popularizer. He paid little attention to the formal elements of prose or verse, but looked to literature for nice observations of human nature and human behavior. Like his contemporaries Shaw and Chesterton, he was fond of the seeming paradox.
He was elected a member to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1910) and its inner group, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1931), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1921), and the American Philosophical Society (1927).
Five feet eight and a half inches tall, with blue-gray eyes and abundant black hair that in middle life turned iron-gray and later white, Phelps continued to play hockey till he was thirty-seven, baseball till he was forty-five, and tennis doubles till he was seventy. His graceful but masculine platform style reflected his athleticism. He loved travel and made frequent trips to Europe.
A gregarious man of warm hospitality, he built a handsome Georgian house on Whitney Avenue in New Haven, which during his lifetime had under its roof a multitude of famous writers, artists, actors, and musicians. He made the acquaintance of practically every author of distinction in Great Britain and America, and persuaded most of them to speak at Yale.
He had enormous zest for life and a Boswellian faculty for enjoying enjoyment. He delighted in literature and he strove to rouse that delight in other people - people in quantity.
Insomnia had been a lifelong burden, and in 1929 he began to be bothered by asthma, suffering increasingly from shortness of breath.
On December 21 1891 he was married to Annabel Hubbard of Huron City, Michigan, who had been in school with him in Hartford. Her parents' house in Huron City became henceforth his summer home. There were no children.
