14 Facts About Bernard Knox

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen.

Bernard Knox was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Bernard Knox was born in 1914 in the City of Bradford, Yorkshire, England.

Bernard Knox served in the United States Army during World War II.

Bernard Knox's son, Macgregor Knox, is a prominent historian of 20th century Europe.

Bored with his first Army assignment with an anti-aircraft battery in England, Bernard Knox volunteered for work with the Office of Strategic Services as he spoke French and some German.

Bernard Knox's team evaded German capture while working with the area resistance, arranging clandestine air parachute drops of weapons, and, when the regulars arrived, did liaison work between the US forces and the French resistance in order to sweep the German Army out of Brittany.

Bernard Knox taught at Yale until 1961, when he was appointed the first director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC After fulfilling a previous commitment to spend a year as Sather Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Bernard Knox served as director of the Center from 1962 until his retirement in 1985.

Bernard Knox is known for his efforts to make classics more accessible to the public.

Bernard Knox taught the poet Robert Fagles at Yale, and became Fagles's lifelong friend and the author of the introductions and notes for Fagles's translations of Sophocles's three Theban plays, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil's Aeneid.

Bernard Knox was the editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and wrote extensively for The New York Review of Books.

Bernard Knox is known for his role in the controversy over similarities between Stephen Spender's World Within World and David Leavitt's While England Sleeps: it was Bernard Knox, reviewing Leavitt's book for The Washington Post, who first pointed out its similarities to Spender's older memoir.

Bernard Knox died of heart failure on July 22,2010.

Bernard Knox was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.