Charles Huntington Whitman

Charles Huntington Whitman (1873-1937) was the Chair of the Department of English at Rutgers University for 26 years (1911-1937) and a noted scholar of Edmund Spenser and early English verse.

Whitman was born in Abbot, Maine, but attended Bangor High School in Bangor, Maine (Class of 1892) before obtaining his B.A. from Colby College in 1897. In 1900 he received a PhD from Yale University for a dissertation on "The Birds in Old English Literature", and went on to an Assistant Professorship at Lehigh University. He accepted the Chair of the Rutgers University English Department in 1911 and held it until his death from a heart attack in 1937.^[1] His tenure saw many reforms, most importantly the creation of a graduate program, and the doubling in size of the faculty. At the time of this death he was considered "one of the most popular professors at the university".^[2]

Among Whitman's published works were:

A modern English translation of The Christ of Cynewulf (Boston, 1900)

A Subject Index to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (Yale, 1919, re-issued NY, 1966)

Seven Contemporary Plays (edited) (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1931, re-issued 1959)

Representative Modern Dramas (edited) (NY: Macmillan, 1936)

Notes

1. ^ Obit. New York Times, Dec. 28, 1937
2. ^ Melissa Arkin, "A History of Rutgers English", online document accessed May 15, 2009 [1]

Persondata
Name	Whitman, Charles Huntinton
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1873
Place of birth
Date of death	1937
Place of death