Whitman, Cedric

Whitman, Cedric (Hubbell) (1916–79) classicist, poet; born in Providence, R.I. After taking his B.A. (1943) and Ph.D. (1947) at Harvard, he joined the faculty, serving as Eliot Professor of Greek Literature from 1974 until his death in 1979. His Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism (1951) won the Award of Merit of the American Philological Association (1952); Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958) won the Christian Gauss Prize given by Phi Beta Kappa to the best book published that year and was one of the postwar era's most influential books of literary criticism on Homer.