Lois Whitney

Lois Whitney (October 14, 1892 – February 1982) was an American academic of English literature and painter who published the 1934 book Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century. She worked as an English professor in Vassar College and Russell Sage College, and during her free time was a painter.

Biography Lois Whitney was born in Oberlin, Ohio on October 14, 1892.

Whitney received her BS (1914) and MA (1915) at the University of Chicago. After spending two years as an instructor in English at the University of Minnesota (1921–1923), she started working at Goucher College as assistant professor of English, before moving to Vassar College in 1926. In 1947, she was promoted from assistant professor to professor, a rank she would hold until her retirement in 1958. In 1934, she published the book Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century. In 1939, she, Louis I. Bredvold, and Alan Dugald McKillop were the co-editors of the anthology Eighteenth Century Poetry & Prose.

Whitney also made paintings as a hobby during her free time.

Whitney, by then a resident of Chicago, died in February 1982.

Publications Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1934)