Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport
Born	November 23, 1927 Anderson, South Carolina, United States
Died	January 4, 2005 (aged 77) Lexington, Kentucky, United States
Occupation	Writer, editor, professor, literary critic
Nationality	United States

Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in the foothills of Appalachia on November 23, 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport said that he became a reader only at 10, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan series. At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories. At 13, he "broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while"; it was then that he began "reading with real interest", beginning with a biography of Leonardo. He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday. At Duke, he studied art(with Clare Leighton), graduating with a degree in classics and English literature.

Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford from 1948 to 1950. He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien and wrote Oxford’s first thesis on James Joyce. In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps. After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard, studying under Harry Levin and Archibald MacLeish.

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