Hearing Homer's Song

The first full biography of "the Darwin of Homeric Studies"-arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century-who overturned the long entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and expanded the very idea of literature. In the early 1930s, Milman Parry introduced the hypothesis that The Iliad and the The Odyssey were not "written" as we understand it, but derived from an oral tradition going back centuries. It was a revolutionary theory, but quickly accepted, and its effects are still felt in contemporary scholarship. But Parry himself has all but disappeared from view. Now Robert Kanigel gives us a full and vivid account of his life: of his childhood in Oakland, California, in the early years of the century; his time as part of the "progressive set" at Berkeley; his marriage at twenty-one to the woman he'd gotten pregnant; their journey to Paris, where he attends the Sorbonne, discovering the pleasures of the city-and the duties of fatherhood and marriage; his appointment to Harvard; and his two extended stays in Yugoslavia, where he believed he could prove his theories definitively by studying the contemporary singers of long unwritten regional epics. Kanigel explores the mystery surrounding Parry's death at thirty-three, and describes how, in the ensuing years, what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which continues to be applied to everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to the latest hip-hop.