Bernard Knox
| Bernard Knox | |
|---|---|
| Born |
24 November 1914 Bradford, West Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 22 July 2010 (aged 95) Bethesda, Maryland, United States |
| Occupation | Professor, author |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Classics |
| Notable works | The Norton Book of Classical Literature (1993); The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics (1993); Introductions to The Iliad (1991), The Odyssey (1997), and The Aeneid (2006) |
| Notable awards | Jefferson Lecture (1992) |
Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox (November 24, 1914 – July 22, 2010) was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen. He was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Knox for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
Knox was born in 1914 in the City of Bradford, Yorkshire, England. He received his B.A. from St John's College, Cambridge in 1936, joined and was wounded in combat with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and served in the United States Army during World War II. In 1939 he married an American, Betty Baur, a novelist who wrote under the pen name Bianca van Orden; she died in 2006. His son, Macgregor Knox, is a prominent historian of 20th century Europe.
Bored with his first Army assignment with an anti-aircraft battery in England, Knox volunteered for work with the Office of Strategic Services as he spoke French and some German. The OSS assigned him to the Jedburgh program, and he parachuted into Brittany on July 7, 1944 with team GILES. His team evaded German capture while working with the area resistance, arranging clandestine air parachute drops of weapons, and when the regulars arrived did liaison work between the US forces and the French resistance in order to sweep the German Army out of Brittany. In the Spring of 1945, he deployed to Italy with an OSS team to work with the Italian Partisans scouting for Allied forces. It was here, during a firefight where he was pinned down in a monastery filled with books that he resolved to take up his studies in the classics should he survive the war. He did so and received an M.A. from Harvard, and a PhD from Yale.
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