Walter Llewellyn Bullock

Professor Walter Llewellyn Bullock (7 March 1890 – 19 February 1944) was a prominent member of the Bullock family, an English scholar, critic, teacher, lecturer and promoter of Italian Studies at the Universities of Chicago and Manchester where he was Serena Professor of Italian. He was founder, in 1937, and general editor of Italian Studies as the annual journal of the Society for Italian Studies. He left his exceptional collection of over 5,000 books and several hundred pamphlets including over 2,600 volumes printed between 1500 and c. 1625 and important critical editions of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, as well as many works on the Questione della lingua to the Manchester University Library at the Victoria University of Manchester.

Family Bullock was born in London in 1890, the eldest son of Rev. Llewellyn Christopher Bullock and Cecil Spearman, daughter of Edmund Spearman C.M.G. and Lady Maria Louisa Spearman (née FitzMaurice). Walter was the elder brother of Sir Christopher Bullock.

Early life He was educated first at Liverpool College, where his father was a teacher, and then at Rugby School from 14 to 19 years old, leaving in 1909.

Bullock then travelled to the United States, where he became a metallurgical chemist in a large malleable-iron metal factory for five years. He spent his spare time taking a drama course and writing and performing plays.

He was a gifted actor and, when he entered Harvard University in 1913, he augmented his income-–he paid all his university expenses from his earnings as a tutor and out of scholarships won—by playing the leading man to Gertrude Kingston who had brought her repertory company to America in 1915 in a production of Shaw's plays. In 1917 he took both his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard. It comprises: over 2,600 volumes printed in the 16th century; nearly 2,000 books and pamphlets consisting of later editions of 16th-century works; a large number of reference works; hundreds of volumes of modern Italian writers and works of criticism.