Whitman, Cedric (Hubbell) (1916-1979)

US classicist and poet. A member of the Harvard University faculty, he served as Eliot Professor of Greek Literature (1974-79). His Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism (1951) won the Award of Merit of the American Philological Association in 1952. His later book Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958) won the Christian Gauss Prize given by Phi Beta Kappa to the best book published that year and was one of the post-war era's most influential books of literary criticism on Homer. Whitman was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He studied at Harvard University, gaining his PhD in 1947.