Gilbert Highet

Classicist, born in Glasgow, W Scotland, UK. He taught at Oxford (1932–7), where he took a double first (1932), before going to Columbia University (1937), where he was an exceptionally popular teacher until his retirement (1972). Books such as The Classical Tradition (1949) and The Art of Teaching (1950), as well as his posts as chief literary critic for Harper's Magazine (1952–4), judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club (1954–78), and host of weekly radio talks, People, Places, and Books (1952–9), made him the country's most widely known popularizer of classics. His bibliography of 1000 items includes his translation of Werner Jaeger's Paideia from German into English. He was married to the novelist Helen MacInnes.

Gilbert Highet, Scottish-American classicist, academic, writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian, born June 22, 1906, in Glasgow, Scotland;

Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States.

Highet devoted most of his energy to teaching, but he also aspired to raise the level of mass culture and achieved broader influence by publishing essays and books, hosting his own radio program, acting as a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and serving on the editorial board of Horizon magazine. Highet was named Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1950. He and his wife, Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), a librarian from Glasgow whom he married in 1932 and who went on to write a number of best-selling popular suspense and espionage novels, became naturalized citizens of the United States in 1951.

Like others teaching at Columbia at this time -- Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Ernest Nagel -- Gilbert Highet conceived of his work as the fostering of a tradition. "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but 'minds' alive on the shelves," Highet wrote.

As a scholar in an era in which parliamentary democracy, Communism, and fascism vied for supremacy, he believed it was the duty of the intellectual to support freedom and defend pluralism.

Above all, he was devoted to learning from the past. but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts." Ernie Seckinger has called Highet "the Harold Bloom of his day, only nicer." Highet tended to be critical of contemporary literature, attributing to it decadent qualities.

Highet wrote voluminously. He is remembered today for The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), The Art of Teaching (1950), Man's Unconquerable Mind (1954), and Juvenal the Satirist: A Study (1954).