The Ever-Present Past

by Edith Hamilton

A great lady with a disciplined and noble mind and an unquenchable love of good literature. In this volume, we can still hear that calm but not passionless voice explaining the grandeurs and difficulties of some of her favorite books and communicating her appreciation of them to us. --Gilbert Highet

Genres: History

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Edith Hamilton, an educator, writer and a historian, was born August 12, 1867 in Dresden, Germany, of American parents and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. Her father began teaching her Latin when she was seven years old and soon added Greek, French and German to her curriculum. Hamilton's education continued at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut and at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1894 with an M.A. degree. The following year, she and her sister Alice went to Germany and were the first women students at the universities of Munich and Leipzich.
Hamilton returned to the United States in 1896 and accepted a position of the headmistress of the Bryn Mawr Preparatory School in Baltimore, Maryland. For the next twenty-six years, she directed the education of about four hundred girls per year. After her retirement in 1922, she started writing and publishing scholarly articles on Greek drama. In 1930, when she was sixty-three years old, she published The Greek Way, in which she presented parallels between life in ancient Greece and in modern times. The book was a critical and popular success. In 1932, she published The Roman Way, which was also very successful. These were followed by The Prophets of Israel (1936), Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1949), Three Greek Plays, translations of Aeschylus and Euripides (1937), Mythology (1942), The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943), Spokesmen for God (1949) and Echo of Greece (1957). Hamilton traveled to Greece in 1957 to be made an honorary citizen of Athens and to see a performance in front of the Acropolis of one of her translations of Greek plays. She was ninety years old at the time. At home, Hamilton was a recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Edith Hamilton died on May 31, 1963 in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the essays in this book, but I should disclose that I have read all seven of Hamilton‘s excellent books. So, I can say that some of the essays repeat ideas Hamilton espouses in her earlier, more well known books. But there are unique essays worth reading. In her essay on William Faulkner, Hamilton gave me a new and thought-provoking perspective on Faulkner and his novels. As a Hamilton fan, I think the forward by her long time companion is very revealing about who Hamilton was.