Paul Elmer More

Paul Elmer More (1864–1937), critic, scholar and prolific writer, had grown up in St Louis, Missouri, and attended Washington University before going on to Harvard; at one time he taught Greek to TSE’s brother Henry. Initially a humanist, by the 1930s he had assumed an Anglo-Catholic position not unlike that of TSE (who appreciated the parallel): see TSE, ‘An Anglican Platonist: The Conversion of Paul Elmer More’, TLS, 30 Oct. 1937, 792. At the outset of his career, More taught classics at Harvard and Bryn Mawr; thereafter he became a journalist, serving as literary editor of The Independent, 1901–3, and the New York Evening Post, 1903–9, and as editor of the Nation, 1909–14, before turning to freelance writing and teaching. TSE keenly admired More’s works, in particular Shelburne Essays (11 vols, 1904–31), The Greek Tradition (5 vols, 1924–31), and The Demon of the Absolute (1928); and he went to much trouble in the 1930s in his efforts to find a publisher for Pages from an Oxford Diary (1937). See TSE’s tribute in Princeton Alumni Magazine 37 (5 Feb. 1937), 373–4.