Quick Facts
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Adam Parry was an American educator and a classical philologist. He was a gifted literary critic and well read in European literature, especially, Greek literature. He was regarded as one of the country's most distinguished classical scholars. He was interested in the history of ideas, which allowed him to look at antiquity as part of a larger continuum.
He was married to his colleague at Yale, Anne Amory, also a classicist and philologist. Their wide-ranging, elegantly written work, and study of ancient texts established them as leaders in Homeric criticism.
Early life and education
Adam Parry (Adam Milman Parry) was born on 1 February 1928, in Paris, France to Milman and Marian Thanhouser. His father was a Homerist and classicist, and a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.
Parry received his B.A. degree in 1949 from the University of California, Berkeley.
He then earned a master's degree in arts in 1950, Ph.D. in 1957 from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. His dissertation was on Thucydides, which began with an examination of the logos/ergon distinction in early Greek.
Career
Parry was a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. He then became an instructor in classics at Amherst College, in Massachusetts, USA, from 1952 to 1955.
After leaving Amherst, he became an instructor at Yale University from 1955 to 1960.
From 1960 to 1961, he was an assistant professor at Harvard, and from 1961 to 1962, he was an assistant professor at Amherst.
After Amherst, he returned to Yale in 1962. At Yale, he was an associate professor until 1968. He was the promoted to professor of classics and chairman of the department in 1968.
Personal Life
Parry married Barbara Pfeiffer on 22 October 1948.
His second marriage was on 11 April 1966 with Anne Reinberg Amory.
Parry and his wife, Anne, died on June 4, 1971, in a traffic accident near Colmar, in north-eastern France. They were returning to France from Germany on a motorcycle they had just purchased. While turning into a highway near Colmar, they collided with a bus and were killed. Parry was 43 years old and his wife was 39.