William Ayres Arrowsmith was an American classicist, academic, and translator.
10 Facts About William Arrowsmith
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William Arrowsmith is remembered for his translations of Petronius's Satyricon and Aristophanes' plays The Birds and The Clouds, as well as Euripides' Alcestis, Cyclops, Heracles, Orestes, Hecuba, and The Bacchae, and other classical and contemporary works.
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William Arrowsmith was the general editor of the 33-volume The Greek Tragedy in New Translations and of Nietzsche's Unmodern Observations.
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William Arrowsmith translated modern works, including The Storm and Other Things by Eugenio Montale, the Nobel laureate Italian poet; Hard Labor by Cesare Pavese, for which he won the US National Book Award in category Translation ; and Six Modern Italian Novellas.
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William Arrowsmith is known for his writings on Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni.
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An academic for most of his life, William Arrowsmith served as chairman of the Classics Department at the University of Texas as well as a professor at Boston University, Princeton University, MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins University, NYU, and Emory University.
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William Arrowsmith gained notoriety with his attacks on graduate education in the humanities in the 1960s, particularly in a Phi Beta Kappa lecture on "The Shame of the Graduate Schools: A Plea for a New American Scholar" published in Harper's Magazine in 1966.
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William Arrowsmith blamed "the hideous jungle of academic bureaucracy" for making the humanities irrelevant to modern life and sacrificing education to trivial research, "the cult of the fact" and career training.
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William Arrowsmith was on the board of the American Association for Higher Education and the International Council on the Future of the University.
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William Arrowsmith died after suffering a heart attack at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts at age 67.