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Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry
From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature.
In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the Darwin of Homeric studies. So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a before Parry and an after. Kanigel describes the before, when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were written texts, the way we think of most literature; and the after that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three.
From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of oral theory, which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.
In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the Darwin of Homeric studies. So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a before Parry and an after. Kanigel describes the before, when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were written texts, the way we think of most literature; and the after that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three.
From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of oral theory, which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 2021
30 people are currently reading
323 people want to read
About the author
Robert Kanigel
21 books135 followersRobert Kanigel was born in Brooklyn, but for most of his adult life has lived in Baltimore. He has written nine books.
"The Man Who Knew Infinity," his second book, was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and a New York Public Library "Book to Remember." It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Thai, and many other languages, and has been made into a feature film, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.
Kanigel's 2012 book, "On an Irish Island," set on a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, was nurtured by a Guggenheim fellowship and later awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
"Eyes on the Street," his biography of Jane Jacobs, the far-seeing author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and fearless champion of big-city life, was published by Knopf in 2016.
His most recent book, "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry," is a biography of the man who revolutionized our understanding of the Homeric epics. In support of this project Kanigel was awarded an NEH Public Scholar award.
"The Man Who Knew Infinity," his second book, was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and a New York Public Library "Book to Remember." It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Thai, and many other languages, and has been made into a feature film, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.
Kanigel's 2012 book, "On an Irish Island," set on a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, was nurtured by a Guggenheim fellowship and later awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
"Eyes on the Street," his biography of Jane Jacobs, the far-seeing author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and fearless champion of big-city life, was published by Knopf in 2016.
His most recent book, "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry," is a biography of the man who revolutionized our understanding of the Homeric epics. In support of this project Kanigel was awarded an NEH Public Scholar award.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
December 15, 2025
3.5.
A decent biography. Expected a little more details about Parry's academic work but I guess it's better to move on to his work itself. The stuff about the Serbian singers was quite interesting though.
Recommend.
A decent biography. Expected a little more details about Parry's academic work but I guess it's better to move on to his work itself. The stuff about the Serbian singers was quite interesting though.
Recommend.
July 5, 2024
Intertexuality 1: I added this book to my endless “to-read” list because it appeared in the footnotes and bibliography of
Homer and His Iliad
by Robin Lane Fox. Much of the information in this book can be found, in a condensed form, in chapter 9 (“Singer of Tales”) of Homer and His Iliad. Milman Parry's life story is so bizarre and improbable, however, that the outline of his life as it appears in Homer and His Iliad made me hungry for more.
Intertexuality 2: The Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) has an interest in things Albanian that often seems to border on mania, esp. considering that LSW herself is not at all of Albanian heritage. So, not long after I launched into a description over the dinner table of the adventures of Milman Parry and his amanuensis* Albert Lord, who braved the primitive road system into the most remote parts of the 1930s Balkans in pursuit of Homer-like singers of tales, LSW pressed into my hands a copy of the novel The File on H. by Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. Kadare met Lord briefly in 1979, forty-plus years after Lord had visited Albanian to make recordings (Hearing Homer's Song, p. 261). The novel that resulted from this meeting, whose protagonists are two Irish-American scholars from Harvard, is described (p. 262) as “[a] comic spy novel, … full of cultural misunderstanding, bits of Homer, and a sprinkling of sex”. More fodder for the “to-read” list.
The author of this book freely admits that Milman Parry, the man, on the basis of the evidence available to us now, eighty years after his mysterious death by gunshot in a Los Angeles hotel, is something of a mystery, an empty and unknowable cipher in the center of the story. He rose up, seemingly out of nowhere, the child of an Oakland, California, shopkeeper. As a very young man, he turned the field of Homeric scholarship on its head by presenting a very convincing case that the works by the author that we now call Homer were almost certainly orally-transmitted stories that were eventually captured and written down in the form that we know them today. He then penetrated the remotest parts of Europe (see above) to find samples of the same type of literature, alive and kicking today, as if Gutenberg et al had never existed.
Parry never seemed to write about himself, keep a journal, confide memorably to friends, or otherwise leave behind clues about what made him tick. Furthermore, the trajectory of his posthumous fame was such that, by the time his curious life and achievement (and violent end) became a subject of interest outside a narrow circle of scholars, many of the people who knew him first-hand were no longer around to be interviewed.
My insufficient colonial education was sadly lacking in ancient Greek, but I am curious about the exact nature of his “big idea”. How did Milman Parry convince the world of the spoken origins of the works attributed to Homer? I’m pleased to report that the explanation that appears in this book (Chapter 14, “Ornamental Epithets”, starting p. 103) is clear and easy-to-understand, even for those of us with inadequate grounding in the classics. It could, in fact, be read completely in isolation and be a useful explainer for the perplexed.
Similarly, I thought that Chapter 26 (“At the Palms Hotel”, starting p. 233) was an exhaustive and clearly-told survey of the contradictory surviving information concerning Parry's sudden death.
A good book, not too long, useful for the amateur and uninformed, aimed at a general, not scholarly, audience.
*It pleases me greatly to have an excuse to use this word.
Intertexuality 2: The Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) has an interest in things Albanian that often seems to border on mania, esp. considering that LSW herself is not at all of Albanian heritage. So, not long after I launched into a description over the dinner table of the adventures of Milman Parry and his amanuensis* Albert Lord, who braved the primitive road system into the most remote parts of the 1930s Balkans in pursuit of Homer-like singers of tales, LSW pressed into my hands a copy of the novel The File on H. by Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. Kadare met Lord briefly in 1979, forty-plus years after Lord had visited Albanian to make recordings (Hearing Homer's Song, p. 261). The novel that resulted from this meeting, whose protagonists are two Irish-American scholars from Harvard, is described (p. 262) as “[a] comic spy novel, … full of cultural misunderstanding, bits of Homer, and a sprinkling of sex”. More fodder for the “to-read” list.
The author of this book freely admits that Milman Parry, the man, on the basis of the evidence available to us now, eighty years after his mysterious death by gunshot in a Los Angeles hotel, is something of a mystery, an empty and unknowable cipher in the center of the story. He rose up, seemingly out of nowhere, the child of an Oakland, California, shopkeeper. As a very young man, he turned the field of Homeric scholarship on its head by presenting a very convincing case that the works by the author that we now call Homer were almost certainly orally-transmitted stories that were eventually captured and written down in the form that we know them today. He then penetrated the remotest parts of Europe (see above) to find samples of the same type of literature, alive and kicking today, as if Gutenberg et al had never existed.
Parry never seemed to write about himself, keep a journal, confide memorably to friends, or otherwise leave behind clues about what made him tick. Furthermore, the trajectory of his posthumous fame was such that, by the time his curious life and achievement (and violent end) became a subject of interest outside a narrow circle of scholars, many of the people who knew him first-hand were no longer around to be interviewed.
My insufficient colonial education was sadly lacking in ancient Greek, but I am curious about the exact nature of his “big idea”. How did Milman Parry convince the world of the spoken origins of the works attributed to Homer? I’m pleased to report that the explanation that appears in this book (Chapter 14, “Ornamental Epithets”, starting p. 103) is clear and easy-to-understand, even for those of us with inadequate grounding in the classics. It could, in fact, be read completely in isolation and be a useful explainer for the perplexed.
Similarly, I thought that Chapter 26 (“At the Palms Hotel”, starting p. 233) was an exhaustive and clearly-told survey of the contradictory surviving information concerning Parry's sudden death.
A good book, not too long, useful for the amateur and uninformed, aimed at a general, not scholarly, audience.
*It pleases me greatly to have an excuse to use this word.
Read
March 25, 2021“The first paradox about the Iliad is that it is a text which is not a text, i.e. it comes out of a tradition of oral performance and oral delivery.”
Barbara Graziosi’s above description—noted on the occasion of Anthony Verity’s OUP Iliad translation, for which she provided notes and an introduction—is accepted as common knowledge now. In the Anglo-sphere at least, this is largely due to the research of Milman Parry. I say “largely” because scholars don’t work in isolation. Parry is credited because he avoided the confirmation bias trap that tripped up generations of previous scholars (and continues to), disrupted ingrained thought patterns, and put scholarly pieces together in a new way.
His life and research are the subject of Robert Kanigel’s forthcoming Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry (Knopf, April 13), which I received from NetGalley for review. The book is part biography of Parry, part historiography of Homeric studies and Parry’s place in it. For non-experts, Kanigel provides an overview of the Homeric question, the linguistic theories Parry drew on in his research, and the scholarly conversations of the early 20th century that Parry stepped into.
Kanigel follows Parry’s early life in Oakland, CA, his troubled marriage, travels to Paris for his studies and the Balkans for his research, and sudden, violent death at 32 under provocative circumstances. Even if you are not a student of Homer, Parry makes a compelling figure for his paradoxes and tensions—intellectually brilliant but seemingly emotionally stunted, creative and broad-minded in his work but seemingly rigid in his personal relationships.
The book’s central question, “What drove Parry,” invites deeper thought about what it takes to create new knowledge. Unable to find institutional support for his studies in the US, Parry traveled to Paris, finally finding mentors to sponsor his PhD at the Sorbonne. The scholars who oversaw Parry’s dissertation defense found in his research not holes but large doors through which ensuing scholars could walk. We might think of “gaps in an argument” as somehow negative, but it’s what great scholarship ideally enables: a new way of thinking about a topic that inspires generations of future scholars.
This ultimately is the gift of Parry’s research: not perfect knowledge but opportunities for exploration. If I were to describe it as punctuation, Parry’s research was a colon to be followed by lines and lines of elaboration and refutation.
Students, academics, and anyone genuinely engaged in the creation of knowledge may especially find this both an interesting and slightly frustrating book. It felt like a delicious appetizer that left me wanting more.
Barbara Graziosi’s above description—noted on the occasion of Anthony Verity’s OUP Iliad translation, for which she provided notes and an introduction—is accepted as common knowledge now. In the Anglo-sphere at least, this is largely due to the research of Milman Parry. I say “largely” because scholars don’t work in isolation. Parry is credited because he avoided the confirmation bias trap that tripped up generations of previous scholars (and continues to), disrupted ingrained thought patterns, and put scholarly pieces together in a new way.
His life and research are the subject of Robert Kanigel’s forthcoming Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry (Knopf, April 13), which I received from NetGalley for review. The book is part biography of Parry, part historiography of Homeric studies and Parry’s place in it. For non-experts, Kanigel provides an overview of the Homeric question, the linguistic theories Parry drew on in his research, and the scholarly conversations of the early 20th century that Parry stepped into.
Kanigel follows Parry’s early life in Oakland, CA, his troubled marriage, travels to Paris for his studies and the Balkans for his research, and sudden, violent death at 32 under provocative circumstances. Even if you are not a student of Homer, Parry makes a compelling figure for his paradoxes and tensions—intellectually brilliant but seemingly emotionally stunted, creative and broad-minded in his work but seemingly rigid in his personal relationships.
The book’s central question, “What drove Parry,” invites deeper thought about what it takes to create new knowledge. Unable to find institutional support for his studies in the US, Parry traveled to Paris, finally finding mentors to sponsor his PhD at the Sorbonne. The scholars who oversaw Parry’s dissertation defense found in his research not holes but large doors through which ensuing scholars could walk. We might think of “gaps in an argument” as somehow negative, but it’s what great scholarship ideally enables: a new way of thinking about a topic that inspires generations of future scholars.
This ultimately is the gift of Parry’s research: not perfect knowledge but opportunities for exploration. If I were to describe it as punctuation, Parry’s research was a colon to be followed by lines and lines of elaboration and refutation.
Students, academics, and anyone genuinely engaged in the creation of knowledge may especially find this both an interesting and slightly frustrating book. It felt like a delicious appetizer that left me wanting more.
May 19, 2021
Any contemporary student of Homer is likely to have heard the name of Milman Parry, probably connected with that of Albert Lord. Few scholars have ever had so profound a transformational effect on how a major work is understood. This book is a welcome exploration of where that transformation came from, situating it in a historical moment among personalities and intellectual currents.
The book itself is the product of a biographer rather than a classicist, which yields both strengths and limitations. Kanigel doesn’t have a partisan bias, but also lacks a sense of the elitism of text-based classicists, many of whom condescend to ‘lesser’ ‘muddy’ ‘subjective’ disciplines like archaeology or anthropology. “The first task of the classicist,” I was told, “is to establish the text.” As Kanigel describes the young Parry’s flirtations with the anthopology crowd at the Univerisity of California, we hear of his classics faculty’s probabable disaproval of their morals, but not what they thought of the scholarly contamination.
As a biography aimed at a popular audience, “Hearing Homer’s Song” is more personality driven than a technical classics piece, although its handling of the technical aspects is quite respectable. The personality coverage is limited by the enigma at its core: Parry didn’t bring anyone inside his intellectual process, either in conversation, or through correspondence.
In a way then, we are left with a parallel to Parry’s own reformulation of the Homeric Question as a paradox: we know it happened, we can observe many aspects affecting its genesis, be we there’s something at the core we’ll never know for certain.
The book itself is the product of a biographer rather than a classicist, which yields both strengths and limitations. Kanigel doesn’t have a partisan bias, but also lacks a sense of the elitism of text-based classicists, many of whom condescend to ‘lesser’ ‘muddy’ ‘subjective’ disciplines like archaeology or anthropology. “The first task of the classicist,” I was told, “is to establish the text.” As Kanigel describes the young Parry’s flirtations with the anthopology crowd at the Univerisity of California, we hear of his classics faculty’s probabable disaproval of their morals, but not what they thought of the scholarly contamination.
As a biography aimed at a popular audience, “Hearing Homer’s Song” is more personality driven than a technical classics piece, although its handling of the technical aspects is quite respectable. The personality coverage is limited by the enigma at its core: Parry didn’t bring anyone inside his intellectual process, either in conversation, or through correspondence.
In a way then, we are left with a parallel to Parry’s own reformulation of the Homeric Question as a paradox: we know it happened, we can observe many aspects affecting its genesis, be we there’s something at the core we’ll never know for certain.
June 24, 2021
This is a book about a brief but important academic career, one that changed the humanities in the 20th century and which is still being debated (I have skin in this game as my own research in prior years focused on the orality of literature).
It was blasphemy to suggest that Homer was not an author who composed his work on paper, or the idea that there was no singular "Homer" but most likely a number of concurrent and successive oral poets who composed on the spot and added and contributed to the larger works we now know as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Aren't books, particularly works of fiction, a work of a singular author who labors by candlelight to write their fevered words down on paper? Surely such works as profound as the Greek epics were planned and executed and revised by a singular genius, who passed down "the book" to us as indisputably end-closed complete and as revised according to their individual intentions?
Parry took the particular feature of Homer that pointed out the performative aspects of the epics (epithets - the main characters are time and again referred to by the same descriptives such as "fair-eyed", "wise", "brave" and the like) and determined that they filled a structural need to complete the line for performance or like a chorus in a song, putting the song "back on track" when it digresses into episodes. As I would add, we KNOW Beowulf was an epic ORAL poem; why not Homer? In a nearly universally illiterate world, of course the neighborhood poets would turn to the spoken word to communicate. Parry verified this when he visited Yugoslavia to witness the oral tradition for himself. (I'm still trying to assert that Shakespeare's plays are MUCH more oral than we give them credit for - it accounts for some of the plot mistakes and the need for so much oral effects in his and other's poems - alliteration and the like. It's a mnemonic device!)
A fun read, despite the threat of being a book about academia. There is also a mystery involved in the private lives of the Parrys, including a mysterious death that may or may not have been an accident. It's certainly a book you want to read if Homer/orality in literature/academia or all three are an area of interest. I'm glad I finally heard the background behind the story I once heard as an undergrad, that Homer was possibly not a person at all but a collection of people who passed down the epic orally. Here's the story.
It was blasphemy to suggest that Homer was not an author who composed his work on paper, or the idea that there was no singular "Homer" but most likely a number of concurrent and successive oral poets who composed on the spot and added and contributed to the larger works we now know as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Aren't books, particularly works of fiction, a work of a singular author who labors by candlelight to write their fevered words down on paper? Surely such works as profound as the Greek epics were planned and executed and revised by a singular genius, who passed down "the book" to us as indisputably end-closed complete and as revised according to their individual intentions?
Parry took the particular feature of Homer that pointed out the performative aspects of the epics (epithets - the main characters are time and again referred to by the same descriptives such as "fair-eyed", "wise", "brave" and the like) and determined that they filled a structural need to complete the line for performance or like a chorus in a song, putting the song "back on track" when it digresses into episodes. As I would add, we KNOW Beowulf was an epic ORAL poem; why not Homer? In a nearly universally illiterate world, of course the neighborhood poets would turn to the spoken word to communicate. Parry verified this when he visited Yugoslavia to witness the oral tradition for himself. (I'm still trying to assert that Shakespeare's plays are MUCH more oral than we give them credit for - it accounts for some of the plot mistakes and the need for so much oral effects in his and other's poems - alliteration and the like. It's a mnemonic device!)
A fun read, despite the threat of being a book about academia. There is also a mystery involved in the private lives of the Parrys, including a mysterious death that may or may not have been an accident. It's certainly a book you want to read if Homer/orality in literature/academia or all three are an area of interest. I'm glad I finally heard the background behind the story I once heard as an undergrad, that Homer was possibly not a person at all but a collection of people who passed down the epic orally. Here's the story.
July 28, 2021
I had two experiences reading this “brief life and big idea” of Milman Parry. The less complicated of the two was the story of Parry’s life and the tragedy that ended it so prematurely. Parry was sui generis, single-minded, and surely not the easiest of men. Like many complete originals he was mystifying, both sympathetic and frustrating to those around him. His biography touched me.
The big idea had to do with Parry’s work that led to acceptance of the idea that Homer was not a singular author in our sense of the word and that the Homeric works emerged from a long tradition of oral composition and transmission across time. Parry arrives at this by studying how the Odyssey and Iliad are written, focusing on meter and the repetition of fixed epithets (grey-eyed Athena or rosy-fingered dawn). Eventually Parry travels to the Balkans to substantiate his ideas by studying another traditional oral culture of storytelling, that of the “guslars” who existed throughout the Balkans. Kanigel presents this all clearly enough, but I wish I understood it even better. It raised more questions in my mind than were answered: how can we as writers understand what it would be like to “live” in an oral world. I wish I knew. It must change everything, but how? In Parry’s relatively brief time in Yugoslavia (1933, 1935), he traveled deep into the cultures and backcountry, recording thousands of “singers of tales”. But what really is the significance of this shift for the understanding of Homer’s works? How does it matter to the ongoing study of Greek classics? What about oral storytelling, can it survive a dominent written culture? It made me think of songs passed down through generations. Does that even happen anymore?
In 1966 I traveled through Yugoslavia to Greece. I was only 15 so didn’t have much to compare to but Yugoslavia was a completely new world and I loved it. I certainly had no idea about the stew of contending cultures and languages under Tito’s grip. Parry’s travels there 30 years earlier brought back memories of the encounter I experienced with that place. So, another point of fascination, another rabbit hole this book beckons me down.
I’ve been meaning to work on committing some favorite poems to memory. I’d better get on it.
The big idea had to do with Parry’s work that led to acceptance of the idea that Homer was not a singular author in our sense of the word and that the Homeric works emerged from a long tradition of oral composition and transmission across time. Parry arrives at this by studying how the Odyssey and Iliad are written, focusing on meter and the repetition of fixed epithets (grey-eyed Athena or rosy-fingered dawn). Eventually Parry travels to the Balkans to substantiate his ideas by studying another traditional oral culture of storytelling, that of the “guslars” who existed throughout the Balkans. Kanigel presents this all clearly enough, but I wish I understood it even better. It raised more questions in my mind than were answered: how can we as writers understand what it would be like to “live” in an oral world. I wish I knew. It must change everything, but how? In Parry’s relatively brief time in Yugoslavia (1933, 1935), he traveled deep into the cultures and backcountry, recording thousands of “singers of tales”. But what really is the significance of this shift for the understanding of Homer’s works? How does it matter to the ongoing study of Greek classics? What about oral storytelling, can it survive a dominent written culture? It made me think of songs passed down through generations. Does that even happen anymore?
In 1966 I traveled through Yugoslavia to Greece. I was only 15 so didn’t have much to compare to but Yugoslavia was a completely new world and I loved it. I certainly had no idea about the stew of contending cultures and languages under Tito’s grip. Parry’s travels there 30 years earlier brought back memories of the encounter I experienced with that place. So, another point of fascination, another rabbit hole this book beckons me down.
I’ve been meaning to work on committing some favorite poems to memory. I’d better get on it.
February 11, 2022
An enlightening biography of classical scholar Milman Parry, focusing on his studies of oral epic poetry and its connection to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
May 26, 2021
A fascinating history of a scholar who screeched across the sky for a moment, lighting up some things previously unseen. The archival evidence is thin in a few places and you can feel the author struggling to stretch the narrative. There are a few parts that get repetitious. But this is a fascinating story about a man and his pursuit of knowledge. If you care about Homer and find academia interesting, it is definitely worth the time.
August 8, 2021
So much more than a biography, this book has changed the way I think about composition and literature.
June 1, 2021
Kanigel writes a biography of Milman Parry, a Homeric scholar, which includes colleagues who worked with him during his formative years and those who carried on his work after his early death. The book doesn't flow easily and would primarily be of interest to those in anthropology, and the classics, especially of Greece. Parry made his life's work proving that some literature, such as that attributed to Homer for the Illiad and the Odyssey, may have evolved as Kanigel describes, "out of a winding oral tradition" and not one author. The possibilities are interesting. The meandering of the Kanigel's telling is not so.
July 11, 2021
This is not a well-written book, but it's a well-told tale (if that makes sense). It's a biography, sort of, of Milman Parry, a scholar who in the 1920s and 1930s developed a new theory about how the epic poems of Homer were written. Parry's idea -- that the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' weren't written by a single person named "Homer" but were instead the accretion of centuries of oral traditions -- was so well-documented and so obvious after it was stated that it quickly changed not only the understanding of Homer, but revolutionized the fields of anthropology and classical studies by giving a lot more weight to the cultural significance of oral traditions.
Parry didn't live to see this happen, as he died of an (probably) accidental gunshot wound a few weeks after returning from field work in Yugoslavia in 1935 that cemented the accuracy of his theories. An American who was his assistant, Alfred Lord, spent decades using the material to build on the ideas, which by the 1960s had reached the level of academic orthodoxy.
It's a fascinating tale, and the author puts in in perspective, showing how Parry's ideas have, quite literally, changed our understanding of how art and culture are created. Today we take it for granted that oral traditions such as Native Americans or shamans or Moslem bards have been creating art for centuries and millennia, and that this art can reach the same pinnacles as art of our times. But this wasn't the prevailing attitude in 1920. The world's scholars were stuck on the idea that lone geniuses -- Shakespeare or Mozart -- created the greatest art. Yes, they built on what preceded them, but their greatness came in writing down, in codifying their ideas so that others could read them and perform them.
Parry showed that this wasn't the way that Homer's works were created, and this led over decades to an understanding that performers (poets, speakers, musicians, actors) created the canon of works for cultures around the world. Even if they were only mediocre poets (or whatever), what was salient was that they took what had been done and changed it to suit their skills and their audience. This is how art developed.
The author does a good job of explaining how Parry came to this conclusion, both through his amazing ability to learn ancient languages, and his careful counting (literally, counting) of phrases in Homer. Parry showed that repetitive phrases which had baffled generations of scholars because they were, frankly, boring and sometimes even nonsense, were actually necessary to give rhythmic balance to the stories when they were told. They were the equivalent of riffs that jazz musicians use in their solos, or the hums and exclamations that singers use. Before Parry, scholars tried to explain the inconsistencies in language in Homer (different ancient dialects), the repetitiveness, the inappropriate information -- but after Parry, all of this was understood as contributing to the experience of the poem, not the meaning.
The other part of the book tries to uncover more about Parry's life. He left little information, as he appeared to be consumed by work, and also died in his mid-30s. Much of what's known was told by his wife, who admitted they had a bad marriage and that she was unhappy being left with childcare (they married when she was 19 because she was pregnant) as he engaged in his studies. In fact, their daughter believed in her later years that her mom had murdered Parry in a fit of rage over real or imagined extramarital affairs.
The gossipy material from Marian Parry is handled lightly and with appropriate skepticism by the author. It feels like a little bit of padding in what is a relatively short book. It certainly has nothing to do with Parry's scholarship, especially as Marian, who seems to be smart, admitted that she was too tired and distracted to even ask Parry what he was working on when he was developing his theory.
And in fact, the book overall feels like padding. There's a lot of repetition to make the point about Parry's key scholastic contribution and about the Parry's strained marriage. There's a fair amount about academic maneuvering, which I can't imagine anyone would care about decades after the fact, especially because, as the author points out, Parry was pretty quickly seen as a star thinker and didn't get harmed by campus intrigues.
So, we're left with a fascinating tale of genuine intellectual innovation, but not enough about how Parry explained his ideas to his colleagues, nor how they have played out in various disciplines ever since. There's some of that, but not enough for me. Instead, we're left with some charming but strange anecdotes, such as the naming conventions of the family: Milman Parry named his son Milman; he and Marian named their daughter Marian; and they called Marian Wux. Their son, Milman Adam Parry, always went by Adam, but the parents called him Duppy and then Mel. Bizarre, to be sure, but not exactly an intellectual history.
Parry didn't live to see this happen, as he died of an (probably) accidental gunshot wound a few weeks after returning from field work in Yugoslavia in 1935 that cemented the accuracy of his theories. An American who was his assistant, Alfred Lord, spent decades using the material to build on the ideas, which by the 1960s had reached the level of academic orthodoxy.
It's a fascinating tale, and the author puts in in perspective, showing how Parry's ideas have, quite literally, changed our understanding of how art and culture are created. Today we take it for granted that oral traditions such as Native Americans or shamans or Moslem bards have been creating art for centuries and millennia, and that this art can reach the same pinnacles as art of our times. But this wasn't the prevailing attitude in 1920. The world's scholars were stuck on the idea that lone geniuses -- Shakespeare or Mozart -- created the greatest art. Yes, they built on what preceded them, but their greatness came in writing down, in codifying their ideas so that others could read them and perform them.
Parry showed that this wasn't the way that Homer's works were created, and this led over decades to an understanding that performers (poets, speakers, musicians, actors) created the canon of works for cultures around the world. Even if they were only mediocre poets (or whatever), what was salient was that they took what had been done and changed it to suit their skills and their audience. This is how art developed.
The author does a good job of explaining how Parry came to this conclusion, both through his amazing ability to learn ancient languages, and his careful counting (literally, counting) of phrases in Homer. Parry showed that repetitive phrases which had baffled generations of scholars because they were, frankly, boring and sometimes even nonsense, were actually necessary to give rhythmic balance to the stories when they were told. They were the equivalent of riffs that jazz musicians use in their solos, or the hums and exclamations that singers use. Before Parry, scholars tried to explain the inconsistencies in language in Homer (different ancient dialects), the repetitiveness, the inappropriate information -- but after Parry, all of this was understood as contributing to the experience of the poem, not the meaning.
The other part of the book tries to uncover more about Parry's life. He left little information, as he appeared to be consumed by work, and also died in his mid-30s. Much of what's known was told by his wife, who admitted they had a bad marriage and that she was unhappy being left with childcare (they married when she was 19 because she was pregnant) as he engaged in his studies. In fact, their daughter believed in her later years that her mom had murdered Parry in a fit of rage over real or imagined extramarital affairs.
The gossipy material from Marian Parry is handled lightly and with appropriate skepticism by the author. It feels like a little bit of padding in what is a relatively short book. It certainly has nothing to do with Parry's scholarship, especially as Marian, who seems to be smart, admitted that she was too tired and distracted to even ask Parry what he was working on when he was developing his theory.
And in fact, the book overall feels like padding. There's a lot of repetition to make the point about Parry's key scholastic contribution and about the Parry's strained marriage. There's a fair amount about academic maneuvering, which I can't imagine anyone would care about decades after the fact, especially because, as the author points out, Parry was pretty quickly seen as a star thinker and didn't get harmed by campus intrigues.
So, we're left with a fascinating tale of genuine intellectual innovation, but not enough about how Parry explained his ideas to his colleagues, nor how they have played out in various disciplines ever since. There's some of that, but not enough for me. Instead, we're left with some charming but strange anecdotes, such as the naming conventions of the family: Milman Parry named his son Milman; he and Marian named their daughter Marian; and they called Marian Wux. Their son, Milman Adam Parry, always went by Adam, but the parents called him Duppy and then Mel. Bizarre, to be sure, but not exactly an intellectual history.
April 3, 2025
3.5
I expected this to be more of an intellectual biography than it was--there was certainly a lot if fascinating information about Milman Parry's work and research, but this was very much the story of his life. That was interesting in its own right, especially for the very thorough examination of how academic work in the early 20th century was supported by an uncredited network of domestic labor. It was also necessary to provide the relevant information in building up to the suspicious circumstances of Parry's death. However, it was the chapters when Kanigel really delved into the content of Parry's intellectual contributions--really what I came to this book for--that really shone for me. There are perhaps three or four chapters here that are significantly dedicated to the substance of Parry's research into the Homeric epics. I would not have minded a more substantial exploration of Albert Lord's life and ideas after the death of Parry--the assistant who takes up the mantle of his boss's groundbreaking research is a fascinating dynamic.
Kangiel is clearly a talented researcher and it seems that he had little in the way of primary sources from Parry himself to work with. Much of what we know about him comes from what was said about him after his death--perhaps this is why the information about his supposed marital infidelity is sparse and hedged. His writing style had a few too many clauses per sentence for my liking. Unfortunately, this is also the way that I write, so this is a pot and kettle situation.
I've been meaning to read this book more or less since it came out, so I'm happy to have finally completed it, even if it isn't exactly what I expected. The story itself is so intellectually electric that I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
I expected this to be more of an intellectual biography than it was--there was certainly a lot if fascinating information about Milman Parry's work and research, but this was very much the story of his life. That was interesting in its own right, especially for the very thorough examination of how academic work in the early 20th century was supported by an uncredited network of domestic labor. It was also necessary to provide the relevant information in building up to the suspicious circumstances of Parry's death. However, it was the chapters when Kanigel really delved into the content of Parry's intellectual contributions--really what I came to this book for--that really shone for me. There are perhaps three or four chapters here that are significantly dedicated to the substance of Parry's research into the Homeric epics. I would not have minded a more substantial exploration of Albert Lord's life and ideas after the death of Parry--the assistant who takes up the mantle of his boss's groundbreaking research is a fascinating dynamic.
Kangiel is clearly a talented researcher and it seems that he had little in the way of primary sources from Parry himself to work with. Much of what we know about him comes from what was said about him after his death--perhaps this is why the information about his supposed marital infidelity is sparse and hedged. His writing style had a few too many clauses per sentence for my liking. Unfortunately, this is also the way that I write, so this is a pot and kettle situation.
I've been meaning to read this book more or less since it came out, so I'm happy to have finally completed it, even if it isn't exactly what I expected. The story itself is so intellectually electric that I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
March 25, 2023
As a biography of Milman Parry, Robert Kanigel's Hearing Homer's Song falls short. But as an explanation of his work, it succeeds greatly. When I first heard of the book (I think from articles in The New Yorker and the Atlantic) the reviewers made claims about Parry's theories that did not ring true with my reading of his work. Happily, Kanigel seems to have really understood the significance of Parry's theories and discoveries, and he explains them clearly for an interested lay audience.
The problem with writing a biography of Parry is that there is not much information about his life. Kanigel grabs every scrap of evidence available, but the early chapters of the book are stretched thin like a stew with too much water. Maybe the problem is that one of the major sources on his life is Milman's wife, Marian, who seems not to have understood him either. There are many enigmas about their marriage. Was Milman a faithful husband, or did he cheat on Marian? He does not seem to have been a very present partner in the marriage, but was this because he was simply immersed in his work at the expense of his family life?
The book really picks up steam when discussing Parry's fieldwork in Yugoslavia, collecting recordings, dictation, and information about the living tradition of oral heroic poetry. Though Parry did not live to digest and synthesize all his findings, his assistant Albert B. Lord tried to do so in his classic The Singer of Tales, one of the best books I've ever read. Kanigel covers some of Lord's life here as well, including an explanation of why it took so long for him to write The Singer of Tales, which came out a full 25 years after Parry's death.
Maybe Milman Parry was a cipher as a man. Sadly, Robert Kanigel does not seem to have cracked the code of his life. But as an introduction to Parry's work and its significance to Homeric studies and to scholarship in general, Hearing Homer's Song is excellent.
The problem with writing a biography of Parry is that there is not much information about his life. Kanigel grabs every scrap of evidence available, but the early chapters of the book are stretched thin like a stew with too much water. Maybe the problem is that one of the major sources on his life is Milman's wife, Marian, who seems not to have understood him either. There are many enigmas about their marriage. Was Milman a faithful husband, or did he cheat on Marian? He does not seem to have been a very present partner in the marriage, but was this because he was simply immersed in his work at the expense of his family life?
The book really picks up steam when discussing Parry's fieldwork in Yugoslavia, collecting recordings, dictation, and information about the living tradition of oral heroic poetry. Though Parry did not live to digest and synthesize all his findings, his assistant Albert B. Lord tried to do so in his classic The Singer of Tales, one of the best books I've ever read. Kanigel covers some of Lord's life here as well, including an explanation of why it took so long for him to write The Singer of Tales, which came out a full 25 years after Parry's death.
Maybe Milman Parry was a cipher as a man. Sadly, Robert Kanigel does not seem to have cracked the code of his life. But as an introduction to Parry's work and its significance to Homeric studies and to scholarship in general, Hearing Homer's Song is excellent.
March 27, 2022
As the subtitle of the book indicates, Hearing Homer’s Song is part biography (of a scholar of classical literature) and part biography of an idea (that the Homeric epics and, by extension, much of world epic poetic ‘literature’ originated as oral poetry). The idea’s a fascinating one; the life, only so compelling. But the book in review is well-written and engaging, and covers its ground ably. I don’t suppose it could be bettered by another popular treatment. It’s not Kanigel’s best, but it’s quite good. Absent alternatives, I suspect it will stand as the popular book on Parry/Lord and the groundbreaking theory they advanced. Deservedly so.
November 2, 2021
This book is truly fascinating, if you are, like me, a fan of Homer and in awe of how this poem was composed. I had long known about Milman Parry, but I did not know the process he went through to create and prove his "big idea." He was inspired and inspiring, but he had flaws as well, as do most creative geniuses. I did not know the details of his life and death, nor how he found the "models" for his Homerian "singers of tales." A tragic ending to an inspired and gifted scholar. I recommend this book to anyone who loves the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," in the original or in translation.
October 28, 2025
This is very engaging, and helps to underscore just how magnificent was Parry’s achievement. There often feels like something is missing though, like it should have gone a little deeper into Parry’s Homeric and Serbocroatian studies. Maybe that’s just because I’m particularly interested in that field and want to hear more specifics about his theories, but I also have to assume most reading a book about Parry would be interested in the same. Narration by Poe is very good. [LIBRARY AUDIOBOOK]
興味深い、パリーの成功はすごい，彼の命すごく残念な短かった。これはよかったな色んな説明，けどたまに浅すぎると思った。ナレーション上手
興味深い、パリーの成功はすごい，彼の命すごく残念な短かった。これはよかったな色んな説明，けどたまに浅すぎると思った。ナレーション上手
January 19, 2025
I feel a little bad giving this three stars and as it does an extremely good and interesting job of telling about Parry's discovery of the oral tradition and Homer ... I just found the detailed focus on Parry not overly interesting which is a little strange since he was an extremely interesting person ... I'm glad I read/listened to it, but the parts I was most interested in probably constitute only half of the book ...
October 25, 2021
It’s been nearly 3 decades since I’d thought of the terms “bucolic diaeresis” or “digamma”, but this book brought me back deep into Homer and the 4 years I devoted to the euphony of rosy-fingered dawn or cow-eyed Hera.
December 21, 2021
A beautiful account of Milman Parry's life and work. It's fun to know more personal biographical information behind such a compelling literary discovery.
Also, he was totally murdered by his wife. Who would have thought?
Also, he was totally murdered by his wife. Who would have thought?
April 7, 2023
This book is a mess, with far too much space given to Parry’s intellectual heir, Lord. Never trust an author who can’t get supporting players’ names right (“Cecil Bowra”). A shame, since I revere Parry.
August 3, 2024
I did not find the story all that interesting. Content-wise, it's just one step up from the Wikipedia entry. The book, however, is very well written. Kanigel knows how to dramatize and yellow up a dull story. I liked it.
Want to read
May 16, 2021Review copy provided by publisher - May 2021
August 8, 2021
The academic ‘proof’ that Homer’s poems existed in oral form before they were written down.
November 30, 2021
What a fantastic introduction to the idea of orality.
May 23, 2022
This tapered out on me. Parry's work and ideas were fascinating, but the rest of the biographical story didn't hold onto me.
February 12, 2022
It is surprising that this is the first popular account of Parry's life and work on Homer. Kanigel provides a detailed account of Parry's life, based on archival sources and interviews. It is good to have what can be known about his death, possibly an accident, possibly murder. Most assumed Parry committed suicide, many that he did so after being denied tenure at Harvard (not true as Kanigel shows). Kanigel also provides a clear and fairly accurate account for laypeople of Parry's highly technical studies of Homer's formulae. The writing is somewhat pedestrian and there are occasional lapses in proofreading; e.g. the noted Greek scholar Paul Shorey shows up both as Paul Storey and Paul Shorey, complete with an index entry for each! But otherwise a decent book.
January 10, 2024
To anyone who sits on beaches contemplating the vexed relationship between orality and literacy, this in-depth biography, or “literary detective story,” of the legendary Milman Parry will edify and entertain. Parry, died mysteriously of a gunshot wound in an LA hotel room at age 33. Parry grew up in Oakland, received B.A. and M.A. in Classical Studies, Greek and Latin at Berkeley. He claimed the concept for his thesis “occurred to me on the day he first saw Homeric literature in a new light” – reportedly on the beach in 1923. The idea come to him, full-blown, but was refined during his PhD studies at the Sorbonne. It was so radical that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after.
His protogé , Alfred Lord, carried on his research and wrote The Singer of Tales documenting their work recording the guslars of the former Yugoslavia on a varying array of primitive recording devices in the ‘30's.
Until Parry’s work, scholars assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, emerging from a long and winding oral tradition into what we think of as literature. While in Paris, Milman was influenced with Paul Jules Antoine Meillet an expert on Slav languages. Through Meillet’s connections, Milman arranged to travel to Bosnia, where literacy was low and the oral tradition was, in the term used by Parry and Lord, the "purest".
Here, he set out to test his theory, and demonstrate that the oral tradition was not the crude second cousin of literature but a highly developed system for composing aloud as you go. If you have encountered Homer, even on a superficial level, you will be aware of the use of epithets for different characters, usually assumed to work as memory devices.
Parry observed that different epithets are used to describe the same character depending upon the grammatical structure of the phrase. Unlike English, Greek is a highly declined language. The metrical structure of Homeric poetry - heroic hexameter – is quite unforgiving. An epithet that works for a noun in the nominative case may not have the right number of pulses to attach it to same noun in another case. So the oral performer needed to have a vast repertoire of different epithets by heart to “sing” an improvised poem. This is explained quite clearly in the book. Wikipedia offers this example: "divine Odysseus", "many-counseled Odysseus", or "much-enduring divine Odysseus" had less to do with moving the story forward than with being in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter verse.
This huge archive of their work is housed at Harvard. I had the amazing experience of seeing a contemporary guslar at a Symposium on Singing Storytellers at the University of Cape Breton. The Balkan gusle is one-stringed spike fiddle, which can sound like an army of bees, as opposed to the Russian one which is a dulcimer. Fortunately for those of us present, Jure came with his own folklorist who spoke perfect English. You, too, can experience Jure Miloš on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMJLa...
In 2016, Dylan did win the Nobel Prize for literature. “It was a decision that seemed daring only beforehand,” Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, observed at the Nobel ceremony, “and already seems obvious.” Homer, Parry, and Lord would all be mentioned when it came time to publicly explain the academy’s decision. “If people in the literary world groan,” said Engdahl, “one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing.”
His protogé , Alfred Lord, carried on his research and wrote The Singer of Tales documenting their work recording the guslars of the former Yugoslavia on a varying array of primitive recording devices in the ‘30's.
Until Parry’s work, scholars assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, emerging from a long and winding oral tradition into what we think of as literature. While in Paris, Milman was influenced with Paul Jules Antoine Meillet an expert on Slav languages. Through Meillet’s connections, Milman arranged to travel to Bosnia, where literacy was low and the oral tradition was, in the term used by Parry and Lord, the "purest".
Here, he set out to test his theory, and demonstrate that the oral tradition was not the crude second cousin of literature but a highly developed system for composing aloud as you go. If you have encountered Homer, even on a superficial level, you will be aware of the use of epithets for different characters, usually assumed to work as memory devices.
Parry observed that different epithets are used to describe the same character depending upon the grammatical structure of the phrase. Unlike English, Greek is a highly declined language. The metrical structure of Homeric poetry - heroic hexameter – is quite unforgiving. An epithet that works for a noun in the nominative case may not have the right number of pulses to attach it to same noun in another case. So the oral performer needed to have a vast repertoire of different epithets by heart to “sing” an improvised poem. This is explained quite clearly in the book. Wikipedia offers this example: "divine Odysseus", "many-counseled Odysseus", or "much-enduring divine Odysseus" had less to do with moving the story forward than with being in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter verse.
This huge archive of their work is housed at Harvard. I had the amazing experience of seeing a contemporary guslar at a Symposium on Singing Storytellers at the University of Cape Breton. The Balkan gusle is one-stringed spike fiddle, which can sound like an army of bees, as opposed to the Russian one which is a dulcimer. Fortunately for those of us present, Jure came with his own folklorist who spoke perfect English. You, too, can experience Jure Miloš on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMJLa...
In 2016, Dylan did win the Nobel Prize for literature. “It was a decision that seemed daring only beforehand,” Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, observed at the Nobel ceremony, “and already seems obvious.” Homer, Parry, and Lord would all be mentioned when it came time to publicly explain the academy’s decision. “If people in the literary world groan,” said Engdahl, “one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing.”
January 3, 2023
This book won't give much or any information not already known to those who have studied Milman Parry in depth. For those, however, who like me knew about his life and work on a basic level, or for those who might know nothing about this young scholar, this book is an easy, quick, and good introduction to Parry's life and work that can serve as a springboard to other sources as well. Milman Parry's thesis in late 1920's to mid-1930's, starting at the young age of 21, changed the way classical scholars thought about Homer's authorship of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Parry's research suggested first what we now know that Homer didn't write the two epics, but they were rather a compilation of oral tradition and oral performance. Until Parry, scholars believed that Homer wrote the two epics; even those who had doubts about how Odyssey and Iliad came to be, they never tried to prove otherwise. Unfortunately, Parry died very young by a shooting accident? suicide? or was it a murder? We'll probably never know. After his death, his assistant and former student Albert Lord continued Parry's work and research and other scholars followed the trail of scholarship that Parry had started. I enjoyed this book very much, but it seems that there are more than a few unnecessary repetitions throughout, and also for about the first hundred pages the focus is more on Parry's unhappy marriage and less focused on his actual research. This slowed my interest somewhat as I was looking forward to learn more about his scholarly work. Having said that, his relationship to his wife is indeed an important part in his life and it has cast a shadow over the real cause of his death. Nevertheless, later the book really picks up on Parry's journey to former Yugoslavia, his meeting with local traditional singers, his recordings, and research in an effort to prove his theory about the manner in which Odyssey and Iliad came to be. Milman brought onto the foreground the question of Homer's authorship and the significance of oral poetry and oral tradition. This is a nice, simple introduction to the life and work of this young scholar who changed the path of ancient Greek scholarship.
December 13, 2023
La fascinant història (i prematura i extranya mort) de l'home que va desxifrar la tècnica creativa emprada a la Ilíada i l'Odisea a partir de l'estudi dels poemes cantats pels guslars dels Balcans, i que va revolucionar el món dels "classical studies". Apassionant!!
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