Parry, Milman (1902-1935)

US philologist. He pioneered in establishing that the Iliad and Odyssey were the works of a preliterate oral poetic tradition involving the use of repeated epithets. With the scholar Alfred Bates Lord he worked on the living oral tradition in Yugoslavia (1933-35), collecting more than 12,000 texts.

Parry was born in Oakland, California. Educated in both the USA and France, He taught at Harvard from 1930 until his sudden death (possibly by suicide) in 1935. In 1971, his son Adam Parry, also a promising classicist who died young, published The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry.