Kittredge, George Lyman, 1860-1941

Kittredge was born in Boston in 1860. His father, Edward "Kit" Lyman Kittredge, had participated in the California Gold Rush of 1849, been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across the desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family. Their precocious and bookish son George attended The Roxbury Latin School, which then had about a hundred pupils. George consistently led his class in marks and won a scholarship to Harvard, which he entered in 1878.

As a freshman, George lived at home in Boston and walked to Harvard every day to save money. Kittredge garnered highest honors and joined several clubs, wrote light verse, and won Bowdoin prizes for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek. He also became a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine. In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated undergraduate theatrical performance of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in the original Greek, attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University. In 1882, Kittredge was elected Ivy Orator (chosen to deliver a humorous speech) of his graduating class. (Graduating with Kittredge that year was Philadelphian Owen Wister, author of the first Western novel, The Virginian).

Lack of money prevented Kittredge from immediately pursuing graduate studies. From 1883 to 1887 he taught Latin at Phillips Exeter Academy. About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin.

In 1886 Kittredge married Frances Eveline Gordon, the daughter of Nathaniel Gordon and Alcina Eveline Sanborn. Her father was a lawyer and philanthropist who had served as president of the New Hampshire Senate and was a deacon in the Second Church (Congregational) of Exeter. The couple honeymooned in Europe, remaining for a year in Germany, which at that time was a mecca of graduate studies and the mother of distinguished philologists and folklorists. Kittredge had already studied German and, although not formally matriculated, attended courses at the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen, in, among other things Old Icelandic. In 1887 he contributed an article for "a learned German periodical" on "A Point In Beowulf." Their children were Francis Gordon (1887–1973), Henry Crocker (1890–1967), and Dora (1893–1974).

Kittredge joined the faculty at Harvard as an instructor in the autumn of 1888. He was soon promoted and in 1896 succeeded Professor Francis James Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages (i.e., languages other than Latin or Greek). He and Child had shared the teaching of English 2 (Shakespeare), which Kittredge took over in 1896 on Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad scholarship, Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see the project through the press and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore, serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society. Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad.

English 2, a Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became well known at the university, was a lecture course of about 275 Harvard students. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf. In the German department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions (which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson, a Celticist); English Metrical Romances (including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo); as well as Child's ballad course.

Kittredge's students included Franklin Delano Roosevelt; John A. Lomax, whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge later supported; and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon, James Madison Carpenter, William S. Burroughs and Stith Thompson. Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941, in Barnstable.