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1867–1963 · RAISED IN FORT WAYNE
The tie. Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany, on 12 August 1867, to American parents — Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond Hamilton — and was brought to Fort Wayne as an infant, to the town her grandfather Allen Hamilton had helped build. She was raised on the family's estate, the Hamilton Homestead at the southeast corner of Clinton and Lewis streets, a compound that grew to three houses across three downtown blocks, housing three generations. No Fort Wayne directory places the family at a numbered Wayne Street address; the Polk directories list the Hamilton Homestead at Clinton and Lewis, and the Allen County Public Library's own bibliography of Fort Wayne authors gives the same corner. Her father taught her at home — Latin from the age of seven, then Greek, French, and German — and she was schooled almost entirely within the family until, at seventeen, she went to Miss Porter's School in Connecticut.
The career. At Bryn Mawr College she took her bachelor's and master's degrees in 1894, then studied at Leipzig and Munich — the first woman admitted to lectures at Munich. From 1896 to 1922 she was headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. The famous career began only after she retired at fifty-five. The Greek Way (1930), published when she was sixty-three, made her name; The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936), her translations in Three Greek Plays (1937), The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943), Witness to the Truth (1949), Spokesmen for God (1949), and The Echo of Greece (1957) followed, and she co-edited the Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961). Above all stands Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1942, which has never gone out of print and remains the standard English introduction to the Greek and Roman myths — the book through which generations of schoolchildren met Zeus and Odysseus. In 1957, at ninety, she traveled to Athens, was made an honorary citizen, and received the Gold Cross of the Order of Beneficence from King Paul of Greece. She died in Washington, D.C., on 31 May 1963, aged ninety-five.
The Fort Wayne of it. The back cover of Mythology carried the line that startled another Fort Wayne writer two generations later: "Edith Hamilton grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana." Michael Martone, who grew up in Hamilton Park — the addition laid out on the family's former land, its streets named for her brother Franklin and her sister Alice, with an Edith Street besides — has said he was amazed that a woman from his town could write the book the whole world was reading. The city eventually said it in bronze: Edith, seated with a book, stands with her sister Alice and her cousin Agnes in the Hamilton Women statues at Headwaters Park, a few hundred feet from the Clinton Street ground where she was raised.
Sources: Indiana Magazine of History, "Edith Hamilton: A Mythical Hoosier" (2012, via Indiana Public Media); Fort Wayne Museum of Art, "The Fort Wayne Hamilton Family" (2020); Fort Wayne city directories (Polk, 1889–90 through 1905), Hamilton Homestead listings; Marguerite C. Ritchie, comp., Fort Wayne Area Authors (Allen County Public Library); publisher records for Mythology (Little, Brown, 1942); Michael Martone interview, A Midwestern Review (DePauw University, 2008).