Background
Arrowsmith, William Ayres was born on April 13, 1924 in Orange, New Jersey, United States. Son of Walter Weed and Dorothy (Ayres) Arrowsmith.
linguist translator classical philologist
Arrowsmith, William Ayres was born on April 13, 1924 in Orange, New Jersey, United States. Son of Walter Weed and Dorothy (Ayres) Arrowsmith.
Bachelor, Princeton University, 1947. Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1954. Bachelor (Rhodes scholar), Oxford University, England, 1951.
Master of Arts, Oxford University, England, 1958. Doctor of Laws (honorary), Loyola University, 1968. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), St. Michael's College, Burlington, Vermont, 1968.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 1969. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Dartmouth College, 1970. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Dickinson College, 1971.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Lebanon Valley College, 1973. DLH (honorary), University Detroit, 1973. DLH (honorary), Grand Valley State College, 1973.
DLH (honorary), Syracuse University, 1982. DLH (honorary), Carnegie-Mellon University, 1974. DLH (honorary), Daniel Webster College, Nashua, New Hampshire, 1989.
He went to schools in Massachusetts and Florida, received an undergraduate degree and a doctorate from Princeton University, and also earned bachelor"s and master"s degrees from Oxford University. Arrowsmith was a Rhodes Scholar while at Oxford and later received Wilson, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. He was awarded ten honorary degrees.
Arrowsmith is remembered for his translations of Petronius’s Satyricon (1959) and Aristophanes’ plays The Birds (1961) and The Clouds (1962), as well as Euripides’ Alcestis, Cyclops, Heracles, Orestes, Hecuba, and The Bacchae, as well as other classical and contemporary works.
He was the general editor of the 33-volume The Greek Tragedy in New Translations (Oxford, 1973) and of Nietzsche"s Unmodern Observations (Yale, 1989). He is also known for his writings on Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni.
A prolific writer and editor, he also founded and edited The Hudson Review and later Arion and served on the editorial board of Delos, Mosaic, American Poetry Review and Pequod. An academic for most of his life, Arrowsmith served as chairman of the Classics Department at the University of Texas as well as a professor at Boston University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Emory University.
He gained notoriety with his attacks on graduate education in the humanities in the 1960s, particularly in a Phi Beta Kappa lecture on "The Shame of the Graduate Schools: A Plea for a New American Scholar" published in Harper"s Magazine in 1966.
He blamed "the hideous jungle of academic bureaucracy" for making the humanities irrelevant to modern life and sacrificing education to trivial research, "the cult of the fact" and career training. Later he served on a National Endowment for the Humanities panel that issued a report in 1984 voicing similar views. He was also on the board of the American Association for Higher Education and the International Council on the Future of the University.
Arrowsmith died after suffering a heart attack at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts at age 67.
An extensive tribute to Arrowsmith appeared in Arion.
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With Army of the United States, 1943-1946. Member Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association, Association American Rhodes Scholars, Phi Beta Kappa.
Son of Walter Weed and Dorothy (Ayres) A. M. Jean Reiser, January 10, 1945 (divorced 1980). Children: Nancy, Beth.