The Classical Tradition by Gilbert Highet

The Classical Tradition by Gilbert Highet

A reissue in paperback of a title first published in 1949.

"Highet has assembled a vast quantity of material concerning the manifold aspects of his subject, filled in gaps where no adequate work has been done, and presented a story characterized by lucidity, charm, and scholarly good sense"--Classical Philology "Solidly grounded and solidly built...[Highet] deals with every period, every movement, every individual, and every separate work as an interesting special case for which he tries to find the special explanation."--The New Yorker "Highet has assembled a vast quantity of material concerning the manifold aspects of his subject, filled in gaps where no adequate work has been done, and presented a story characterized by lucidity, charm, and scholarly good sense."--Classical Philology "A magnificent reference book....A noble effort toward the accomplishment of a staggering task."--Western Humanities Review "It is Highet's appreciation of good literature...which gives a special charm to his book...[It] will be read with gratitude by many."--Times Literary Supplement (London) "Solidly grounded and solidly built...[Highet] deals with every period, every movement, every individual, and every separate work as an interesting special case for which he tries to find the special explanation."--The New Yorker "An excellent outline...[an] intelligent, erudite, perceptive interpretation...a book for the times."--The Nation "A prodigious task, demanding learning, judgment, insight, and above all courage. Mr. Highet is to be congratulated on possessing all these....[He] founds his work on a sound knowledge of a vast array of facts and arranges them with great clarity....We may be thankful that Mr. Highet has attempted this task and succeeded, as very few could have, in it."--The Sewanee Review

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a middle-class family. He showed an early facility with Latin and Greek, reading Homer, Virgil, and Aeschylus for pleasure by the time he was sixteen. He attended Glasgow University, and later Oxford's Balliol College, sweeping up most of the available prizes and scholarships along the way. In 1937 Highet joined the faculty of Columbia University, becoming a full professor at thirty-one. He taught at Columbia until 1972 (with the exception of a period during WWII, when he was stationed as an officer in Washington, D.C. and later assisted in the return of looted goods in Europe), becoming a legend for his animated and inspiring lectures. A very public intellectual, Highet served on the boards of Horizon magazine (1958-77) and the Book-of-the-Month Club (1954-78), was chief literary critic for Harper's (1952-54), and hosted a cultural affairs radio program, People, Places, and Books (1952-59), that was broadcast on more than three hundred stations in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Highet wrote, translated, or edited some twenty books, of which The Classical Tradition (1949) and The Art of Teaching (1950) remain the best known. He was married to Helen MacInnes, a successful writer of espionage novels, from 1932 until his death from cancer in 1978.

Michael C.J. Putnam is MacMillan professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature, Brown University. Among his recent books are Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace and Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry. In May 2009 he was awarded the Centennial Medal by the American Academy in Rome. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780195002065
ISBN 10	0195002067
Title	The Classical Tradition
Author	Gilbert Highet
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	1985-11-21
Number of pages	800
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable