Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone
Writing Shanghai Scribbles, Hongcun, Anhui, China, 2006
Born	(1927-11-13) 13 November 1927 (age 89). Lewiston, Maine
Nationality	American
Occupation	Professor, Poet, Literary Critic, Memoirist, Translator, Biblical and Gnostic Scholar
Children	Aliki, Robert, and Tony
Parent(s)	Robert Barnstone and Dora Lempert

Willis Barnstone (born November 13, 1927) is an American poet, memoirist, translator, Hispanist, and comparatist. He has translated the Ancient Greek poets and the complete fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος). He is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.

Born in Lewiston, Maine, Barnstone grew up in New York City. He went to the World Series with his father to see Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth play. Barnstone's family resided on Riverside Drive, facing the Hudson River. In spring 1939, Joe (an elevator operator in his apartment building) took him upstairs to Ruth's apartment on the 18th floor. He was in his Boy Scout uniform. A newspaperman handed him a pile of baseball diplomas which the Babe would give out the next day at the 1939 World's Fair to raise money for poor school kids. The picture appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News.

He completed his secondary education at Stuyvesant High School, the George School, and Phillips Exeter Academy before receiving degrees from Bowdoin College (B.A., 1948), Columbia University (M.A., 1956) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1960). He also studied at the University of Mexico (1947), the Sorbonne (1948–49) and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (1952-53). While in high school and college he worked as a volunteer with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in Aztec villages south of Mexico City. Addicted to foreign tongues, in 1973 he studied Chinese at Middlebury College in their summer language program. He taught in Greece at the end of the Greek Civil War from 1949 to 1951 and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War from 1975 to 1976. He was in China in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution. A decade later he was Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1984–1985.