About Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (Springfield, October 12, 1910 – Hamden, January 16, 1985) was an American poet, translator, Latinist and Greek scholar. After graduating from Harvard in 1933, Fitzgerald worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune for a year before moving to TIME, where he worked alongside William Saroyan, Whittaker Chambers, and James Agee. At the outbreak of World War II, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving at Guam and Pearl Harbor.After serving as poetry editor of The New Republic, Fitzgerald replaced Archibald MacLeish as professor of rhetoric and public speaking at Harvard in 1965 and held the chair until his retirement in 1981. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fitzgerald is best known as a highly regarded translator of Greek and Latin classics, particularly renowned for his translations of the Odyssey and the Aeneid. For his translation of the Odyssey, he received the Bollingen Prize for Translation in 1961. He also translated Euripides' Alcestis (1935) and Antigone (1938), Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (1948) and Oedipus at Colonus (1961). He was also the translator of many modern French poets like Saint-John Perse and Paul Valery. Furthermore, he also edited the posthumous publication of James Agee's works in verse and prose and appeared in the film Agee dedicated to the latter.
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