John Erskine (educator)

John Erskine (October 5, 1879 – June 2, 1951) was a U.S. educator and author, born in New York City and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University (A.M., 1901; Ph. D., 1903).

Professor Erskine was an English professor at Columbia from 1909 and 1937, and Amherst. He instituted Columbia College's General Honors Course, a two-year undergraduate seminar that would later help inspire "Masterworks of Western Literature," now known commonly as "Literature Humanities," the second component of Columbia College's Core Curriculum. This course taught the classics in translation instead of the original Latin or Greek. This course would later go on to inspire the Great Books movement, centered around the Great Books of the Western World.

In 1946 he served as the first chairman of the American Writers Association.

Erskine co-wrote the 1900 Varsity Show, The Governor's Vrouw, with poet Melville Cane. He won the Butler Medal in 1919.

Erskine Place, a street in the New York City borough of The Bronx, was named after him.

Erskine was also the author of numerous publications, including several humorous novels retelling myths and legends. These included The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Penelope's Man and Adam and Eve, Though He Knew Better.

Erskine also wrote the libretto for George Antheil's opera Helen Retires, which was based on The Private Life of Helen of Troy.

To commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of Roger Bacon, Erskine wroteA Pageant of the Thirteenth Century, a biographical play which was produced at Columbia University and published as a book by Columbia University Press in 1914. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.

Bibliography

• The Elizabethan Lyric (1903)
• Selections from the Faerie Queene (1905)
• Actœon and Other Poems (1907)
• Leading American novelists (1910)
• Written English, with Helen Erskine (1910; revised edition, 1913)
• Selections from the Idylls of the King (1912)
• The Kinds of Poetry (1913)
• Poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, with W. P. Trent (1914)
• Contemporary war poems (Introduction) (1914)
• The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, and Other Essays (1915)
• Interpretations of literature, by Lafcadio Hearn (edited and with an introduction by Erskine) (1915)
• Appreciations of poetry, by Lafcadio Hearn (edited and with an introduction by Erskine) (1916)
• Life and literature, by Lafcadio Hearn (edited and with an introduction by Erskine)(1917)
• The Shadowed Hour (1917)
• Democracy and Ideals (1920)
• Short history of American literature; based upon the Cambridge history of American literature (1922)
• The Little Disciple (1923)
• The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1925)
• Sonata (1925)
• Galahad (1926)
• Adam And Eve (1927)
• American Character (1927)
• Prohibition And Christianity, And Other Paradoxes (1927)
• The Delight Of Great Books (1928)
• Penelope's Man (1928)
• Sincerity (1929)
• Uncle Sam In The Eyes Of His Family (1930)
• Cinderella's Daughter, And Other Sequels And Consequences (1930)
• The Influence of Women and Its Cure (1936)
• The Brief Hour Of Francois Villon (1937)
• The Start Of The Road (1938)
• Baker's Wife (1940)
• Give me liberty; the story of an innocent bystander (1940)
• Casanova's women, eleven moments of a year (1941)
• The Human Life of Jesus (1945)
• Venus, the Lonely Goddess (1949)
• My Life in Music (1950)

External links

• Erskine Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
• Find a Grave (memorial site)
• The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, essay by John Erskine