century association biographical archive

Earliest Members of the Century Association

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Edward Everett Hale Jr.

Professor of English Literature

Centurion, 1903–1932

Born 18 February 1863 in Boston, Massachusetts

Died 19 August 1932 in Schenectady, New York

Buried Vale Cemetery, Schenectady, New York

Proposed by Percy Stickney Grant and Hamilton W. Mabie

Elected 7 March 1903 at age forty

Archivist’s Note: Uncle of Herbert Dudley Hale and Robert Beverly Hale

Century Memorial

Edward Everett Hale inherited a name so well-known in American letters as in a way to obscure his own achievements in the collegiate chair of English. His father’s “Man without a Country”—that purely imaginative story of an American officer who had cursed his government in a moment of ill-humor, had thereupon been deprived of American citizenship, and had spent the rest of his roving life in sorrowful remorse—was told in so frank and matter-of-fact a manner, was so convincingly supported by allusion to casual incident, as actually to have elicited petitions to our government for the unhappy alien’s restoration as a citizen. A literary achievement of that sort, for which perhaps no parallel exists outside of Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, set a hard pattern for the second generation, and the Dr. Hale of our later times did not undertake to match it. He was a quiet and gentle instructor, personally loved by his classes at Cornell and Union. What he published was chiefly criticism or text-books.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook