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1867-1963
The correction first: Edith Hamilton is often printed as a Fort Wayne native, and the record, kept carefully, says something more interesting. She was born on 12 August 1867 in Dresden, Germany, where her American parents, Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond Hamilton, were living, and she was raised, from infancy, in Fort Wayne. Dresden holds the birth. Fort Wayne holds the making of her, and the making is the documented part: the Hamilton family's three-block estate at the edge of downtown, three generations under one discipline, where Montgomery's daughters were educated at home in the classical tradition usually reserved for sons. The Indiana Magazine of History's account is precise about it: the girls were schooled almost entirely at home until late in their teens, mostly by their father, who taught them languages and set them reading widely in the family library. Edith learned Latin, Greek, French and German at that table.
The first career: At seventeen she left for Miss Porter's School in Connecticut, took her bachelor's and master's degrees at Bryn Mawr College in 1894, studied in Germany, and in 1896 became headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, a preparatory school for girls. She presided over it for twenty-six years, a formidable educator in the classical mold she had been raised in, and by any ordinary measure that was a complete and distinguished career. She retired in 1922, at fifty-five, having published nothing the wider world knew.
The second career: What followed made her, for a generation of readers, the voice of the ancient world. The Greek Way appeared in 1930, The Roman Way in 1932, and in 1942 Mythology, the retelling that has never gone out of the hands of students since. The books were not scholarship addressed to scholars; they were the Fort Wayne home schooling turned outward, the conviction that the Greeks could be read directly, with pleasure, by anyone willing to sit at the table. Greece decorated her for it: in 1957 she was made an honorary citizen of Athens, an old woman honoured in the city she had spent her life interpreting. She died on 31 May 1963 in Washington, D.C. Her full entry, and her sisters', stands in the people record; this section carries her because for millions of readers who never heard of Fort Wayne, her name is the one on the Story of Fort Wayne section of the ancient world, and the ancient world, in her case, started at a family table in Indiana.
Sources:
- Indiana Magazine of History, "Edith Hamilton: A Mythical Hoosier" (the Dresden birth and Fort Wayne upbringing; the home schooling; Bryn Mawr 1894; the headmistress years; the honorary citizenship of Greece, 1957), via Indiana Public Media.
- Gale, Hamilton, Edith (1867-1963) (the writings: The Greek Way, 1930; The Roman Way, 1932; Mythology, 1942; the Bryn Mawr School headship).