William Lyon Phelps

William Lyon Phelps (January 2, 1865 – August 21, 1943) was an American author, critic and scholar. He taught the first American university course on the modern novel. He had a radio show, wrote a daily syndicated newspaper column, lectured frequently, and published numerous books and articles.

Early life and education

Phelps's father Sylvanus Dryden Phelps was a Baptist minister, and the family had deep ancestral roots in Massachusetts Bay Colony. William, as a child, was a friend of Frank Hubbard, the son of Langdon Hubbard, a lumber merchant who founded Huron City, Michigan.

Phelps earned a B.A. and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1887, writing an honors thesis on the Idealism of George Berkeley. As an undergraduate, he established The Pundits, a secret society.

He earned his Ph.D. in 1891 from Yale and in the same year his A.M. from Harvard.

In 1915, Phelps encouraged Alexander Smith Cochran to dedicate the Cochran family's extensive collection of Shakespearean folios and other rare books to endow a private club for the arts and humanities. Phelps taught at Yale for 41 years before retiring in 1933.

Public speaking and writing

Phelps often drew large audiences. He lectured on the Town Hall Lecture circuit nationwide.

After his retirement from Yale, he continued to present public lectures, radio talks, and write a daily newspaper column about books and authors. He continued to give a series of Sunday sermons each summer and offer a 20-week lecture course in literature during the winter. He presented several college commencement addresses each year and served as a judge of the Pulitzer Prize for literature and on book club selection committees.

Personal life Phelps's wife, Annabel, inherited her family's estate and William christened it "The House of the Seven Gables,” after the Nathaniel Hawthorne story. Her father had built the house in 1882 on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron. The couple was married on the estate on December 21, 1892, and they lived there part-time from 1893 through 1933, when he retired, and full-time through 1938. Essays on Modern Novelists (1910) Essays on Russian Novelists (1911) Essays on Books (1914) The Advance of the English Novel (1916) The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1918) Archibald Marshall A Realistic Novelist (1919) Essays on Modern Dramatists (1921–1922) Some Makers of American Literature (1923) As I Like It (1923) Essays on Things (1930) A Private Library (1933) What I Like (in Prose) (1933) Autobiography with Letters (1939) Marriage (1940)