Born in Boston in 1861, Kittredge attended Harvard, winning the Bowdoin prize twice, and receiving his A.B. in 1882. After teaching Latin at Exeter for six years, he was appointed instructor of English in 1888. Immediately popular with the Faculty and the student body, he soon became a full professor, and in 1917 was named Gurney Professor of English, a post he held until his retirement in 1936. Although he was given a plethora of honorary degrees (from Harvard, Oxford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Brown, Trinity, Union and Colby), he never received a Ph.D. "Who," he replied when someone asked why not, "could examine me?"

Kittredge was a hale, hearty man, who chain-smoked cigars to save on matches and always wore a pearl-gray suit. He carried a cane which he held high in the air to stop Harvard Square traffic, causing one truck driver to remark, "Who do you think you are--Santa Claus?" He also used his cane to knock the hats off students rude enough to wear them inside Widener. An associate of Leverett House, his portrait hangs in the Dining Hall there.

25th Year at Harvard

To celebrate his 25th year of teaching at Harvard, 45 of his friends, on the faculties of many universities, prepared erudite essays for a congratulatory volume. He was not only popular with scholars, however. Kittredge had so large a Boston following that when it was announced that he would give the Lowell Institute lectures for 1934, the demand for tickets was so great that he gave each lecture twice, in the afternoon and in the evening.

Several years later, some efficiency experts asked him how long it took for him to prepare an average lecture for English 2. "I refuse to answer. It's one of my trade secrets," he said, but when he was pressed for a reply, he relented. "Just a lifetime--can't you see that?"

'The Puzzle of Life'

The closing lines of Chaucer and His Poetry sound strangely like a confession; "...Geoffrey Chaucer, poet, idealist, burgher of London, Commissioner of Dykes and Ditches, who loved his fellow man both good and bad, and found no answer to the puzzle of life but in truth and courage and beauty and belief in God." Kittredge longed to have a chance to live in an age when this sort of life was possible, a desire hinted at in Witchcraft in Old and New England, "We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath and the doctor universalis are gone forever." In trying to fullfill this archaistic longing, Kittredge achieved an unusual stature for the modern age