George Frisbie Whicher, 1889–1954, a bio-bibliography

George Frisbie Whicher, whose Columbia University thesis on Eliza Haywood was foundational to Haywood studies (i.e., The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915)), has long been an enigma to me. Although his Columbia thesis was so important to Haywood studies, it seems that he never revisited the subject. At all. In forty-one years of academic life. In the circumstances, a meme something like this seems appropriate:

I have made multiple attempts in the past to peer into Whicher’s life, but never got very far. My most recent attempt was in January of 2018. Improvements in AI have vastly simplified this task, as has Anna’s Archive, so I have finally finished the following brief biography and bibliography.

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George Frisbie Whicher (1889–1954) was the son of Lillian Hope and George Meason Whicher (1860–1937), a noted classics professor and poet. GMW seems to have been (appropriately) peripatetic: moving from Hastings College, Nebraska (1883–88), to Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn Heights, New York (1892–1900), then to Hunter College, Manhattan, New York (ca. 1900–1924), and finally—after GFW completed his own studies—to the Classical School in Rome (1921).

George Frisbie Whicher received his B.A. in 1910 from Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he taught from 1915 to 1954, having received his PhD from Columbia in 1913, and having been an instructor in English at the University of Illinois from 1913 to 1915. As noted, his Columbia thesis was foundational to Haywood studies, but his most influential work may have been This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (1938), which is credited with establishing Dickinson as a major figure in American literature. Whicher’s other notable works include: The Goliard Poets (1949), a collection of translations of medieval Latin songs and satires, Walden Revisited (1945), a centennial tribute to Henry David Thoreau, and Poetry and Civilization (1955); a posthumously published collection of his essays, edited by his wife. It is this collection which provides the basis of the bibliography below.

Whicher was married to Professor Harriet Fox Whicher (1890–1966) of Mount Holyoke. Born Harriet Fox, she earned her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College and went on to have a distinguished academic career as a Professor of English in the English Department at Mount Holyoke. It seems that George and Harriet were close friends of the novelist hereWilla Cather (1873–1947).

The son of George and Harriet, Stephen Emerson Whicher (1915–61) was an influential American literary critic, biographer, and professor, best known as one of the leading scholars on Ralph Waldo Emerson. SEW earned degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University. He taught at Swarthmore College for a decade (1947–57) before becoming a Professor of English at Cornell University in 1957. His tenure there was short; SEW committed suicide at the age of 46—having been "upset by the prospect of continued world tension" (according to the NYT article, here)—leaving behind his mother Harriet, "his wife, Elizabeth, and four children, Susan, Nancy, Stephen and John." It is probably relevant that SEW served in the Navy during WW2 and received two combat stars during his service, so it is certainly possible he had something like PTSD.

An obituary for GWF: James Woodress and Robert P. Falk. "In Memoriam: George Frisbie Whicher, 1889-1954." American Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1954): 255–56, starts: "The American Literature Group lost one of its most distinguished members when George Frisbie Whicher of Amherst College died on March 7. Few men have brought more honor to their profession through their lives and their writings than George Whicher did in his forty-one years of academic life."

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A Bibliography of the works of George Frisbie Whicher

Books [5]
—The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York, 1915).
—This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (New York, 1938).
—Alas, All's Vanity, or, A Leaf from the First American Edition of Several Poems by Anne Bradstreet (New York, 1942). ¶ a "leaf book" published by the Collector's Bookshop in New York, containing a leaf from the 1678 Boston edition of Anne Bradstreet's Several Poems.
—Walden Revisited: A Centennial Tribute to Henry David Thoreau (Chicago, 1945).
—Mornings at 8:50: Brief Evocations of the Past for a College Audience (Northampton, MA, 1950).

Works edited, with Introductions [7]
—George Borrow, Lavengro (New York, 1927).
—W. G. Hammond, Remembrance of Amherst(New York, 1946).
—Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Selected Essays (Chicago, 1947).
—Horace, Selected Poems of Horace (New York, 1947).
—Poetry of the New England Renaissance, 1790-1890 (New York, 1950).
—The Transcendentalist Revolt against Materialism (Boston, 1949). Problems in American Civilization Series.
—William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign of 1896 (Boston, 1953). Problems in American Civilization Series.

Translations [2]
—On the Tibur Road: A Freshman's Horace. With George Meason Whicher (Princeton, NJ, 1911).
—The Goliard Poets (New York, 1949).

Contributions [22]
—"Early Essayists" and "Minor Humorists" in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et al. (New York, 1917–21).
—[Seventeen articles] in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York, 1943).
—"Chapter 34: Literature and Conflict." in The Literature of the American People, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn (New York, 1951).
—"Part IV: The Twentieth Century." in A Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. (New York, 1948).
—"Introduction," in Publius Virgilius Maro, The Georgics, trs. Jolın Dryden. With an Introduction by George F. Whicher and Illustrations by Bruno Bramanti (Verona, Italy, 1952; rpt. New York, 1953).

Articles, poems, and reviews for various periodicals [not enumerated; I will add these as I find them]
—"The Present Status of the Bibliography of English Prose Fiction between 1660 and 1800" PMLA, Vol. 36, Appendix (1921), pp. c-cvi. NEW
¶ This essay "rehearse[s] the tale of existing bibliographies of fiction, both published [Charlotte E. Morgan (1911), Arundell Esdaile (1912)] and unpublished [Chester N. Greenough, John M. Clapp]." In it, Whicher notes that "Upon his retirement from teaching a few years ago, Mr. Clapp bequeathed his [mauscript bibliography of 18C fiction] cards to me. I have as yet done nothing to improve my inheritance" (civ) and that "In 1913 I had occasion to go through the files of three newspapers in the Burney Collection from 1720 to 1730, noting all titles of fiction with the date of the first 'This day published' advertisement." (cv) I discuss Whicher's essay and the manuscript collections he mentions in my post "Knitting for Bibliographers, by Professor Greenough" (here).
—"Shakespeare for America" [reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly, Boston (June 1931).

[2026.05.10 UPDATE: added items under Articles]