Quick Facts
Biography
Edward Payson Evans (December 8, 1831 – March 6, 1917) was a United States scholar and linguist.
Biography
His father was a Welsh Presbyterian clergyman, who came to the United States in 1842. Evans graduated from the University of Michigan in 1854, and then taught at an academy in Hernando, Mississippi, for one year. He then became a professor at Carroll University (then Carroll College) in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
From 1858 to 1862, he traveled abroad, and studied at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Munich.
On his return to the United States, he became professor of modern languages in the University of Michigan. In 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson. In 1870, Evans resigned his position at Michigan and went abroad again, where he gathered materials for a history of German literature, and also made a specialty of oriental languages. He became a fixture at the Royal Library in Munich, and joined the staff of the Allgemeine Zeitung in Munich in 1884.
When World War I broke out in 1914, he returned to the United States, where he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
Elizabeth Evans
Elizabeth Edson Gibson Evans (1832 – 1911) Daughter of Dr. Willard Putnam Gibson and Lucia Field Williams and was married to Edward Payson Evans in 1868. She was a contributor to Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, Nation, etc. Author of 9 books, including: A History of Religions, 1892; The Christ Myth (her last book), 1900.
Works
Besides many articles in reviews and magazines, he published Abriss der deutschen Literaturgesehichte (New York, 1869) a Progressive German Reader (1870), and translated Adolf Stahr's Life and Works of Lessing (with an introduction; 2 vols., Boston, 1866), and Coquerel's First Historical Transformations of Christianity in 1867. In 1887 he published Animal Symbolism in Art and Literature and Animal symbolism in ecclesiastical architecture, and a History of German Literature in five volumes, in 1898 Evolutional ethics and animal psychology and in 1906 Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.