Bernard Knox

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox (Ph.D., Classics, Yale University; M.A. Harvard University; B.A., St. Johns College Cambridge, 1936) was a classicist, author, and critic. He taught at Yale until 1961, when he moved on to become the first director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. He was the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote the introductions and notes for Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.In 1939 he married American novelist Betty Baur, who wrote under the name Bianca van Orden. He served in the United States Army during World War II, making his way from private to captain between 1942 and 1945 in the European Theatre, and was awarded a Croix de Guerre a l'Ordre de l'Armée for parachuting behind Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces. Knox additional was the recipient of the 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (1990), and the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1990).