Gwynne Blakemore Evans
Gwynne Blakemore Evans, the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and the foremost Shakespearean textual scholar of his day, was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 31, 1912. The son of Marshall Blakemore Evans and Theodora (Grose) Evans, he attended public schools in Columbus, where his father was head of the German Department at the Ohio State University. In high school, he spent a year at what is now Southampton University in England, where one of his masters was the celebrated Donne scholar J. B. Leishman. Despite his characteristic modesty, GBE once confessed that during this year he introduced the Lindy Hop to England. He received a B.A. from Ohio State in 1934, an M.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1936, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940. GBE taught at Brooklyn College in the early 1940s and then married the happy inspiration of his life,...