Theodore Morrison is director of English A. He is not a tyrant who broods in a Warren House office over new ways to torture Freshmen and take the joy out of their bright young lives. If he were not enthusiastically devoted to what he calls a "blundering and profane" game of tennis, if he did not spend his summers on a Vermont farm where he can swim and chop wood and write, if his own two children were not rather young, he would make a wonderful grandfather. He has forgotten his age; he looks at you straightforwardly with kindly, maybe even twinkling eyes; he smokes a pipe while he talks; and once there was even the massive bound lying near the study door.

Morrison does not remember just when he began and ended as an associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly and instructor, tutor, and assistant professor at Harvard. It is pretty well established that he graduated here in 1923, taught English for two years, and then joined the Atlantic staff. In those days the self-assured calm of the monthly had not attained the heroic proportions that recently made a semi-scandal out of color-of-cover innovations. Morrison indirectly participated in three memorable episodes when the Atlantic published Felix Frankfurter's Sacco-Vanzetti case analysis that stirred up a new trial, copious New Salem Lincolniana that later proved completely "cooked up," and Al Smith's "hot" literary rebuttal to a challenge of his right to run for governor that was stolen in the proof sheets and published prematurely by a Boston newspaper.

In 1931 Morrison returned to Harvard. After six years of shuttling around in the English department, he took over English A from Professor Hillyer, his own former instructor. He headed the course a year before the President knew it had changed hands, and he would still rather talk about its program and purpose than about himself.

"Everyone," he says, "has a right to grouse about English A" because too few people have been let in on the secret of its aim. It seeks to improve not only writing but also reading and thinking, with which writing must be inevitably connected. English A is therefore a synthesis of literary and non-literary elements. As the sole course in the humanities that is directly specified for a degree, it must especially emphasize its literary side in wartime when science and technology are beamed upon and the "liberal tradition" is shunned. That is why English A section men discuss Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady when two-thirds of their students are worrying about long white envelopes from the War Department.

Another directorate of Morrison's is that of the annual Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a literary group that meets the last two weeks of August at Bread Loaf Inn near Middlebury, Vermont, to criticize and discuss each other's poems, short stories, articles, and novels. Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost, and Bernard De Voto are on the staff. Morrison has himself published several volumes of verse, including "Serpent in the Cloud," 1931, and "Notes on Life and Death," 1935.

Morrison confesses that he is a queer bird, like one of the thieves in the New Testament, half-administrator, half-teacher, and a writer and family man on the side. Even in an Old Testament, tooth-for-tooth world, he is a likeable bird at that.