John Adams Scott

SCOTT, JOHN ADAMS (Sept 15, 1867 - Oct. 27, 1947), classicist, was born in Fletcher, Illinois, a small town in McLean County. He was the first son of seven children born to James Sterling Scott and Henrietta P. (Sutton) Scott. His father, born in Nova Scotia, had worked in Boston for a while in the carriage-making shop managed by his brother John. Because of ill health, James Scott moved to the Midwest and became a farmer. At a very early age, John Adams and his younger brother Walter Dill (later president of Northwestern University, 1920- 1939) worked on their father's 120-acre farm, and by 1880 they were managing it almost completely. Scott's early education was provided by his older sister Louise, who tutored both him and Walter at home. He graduated from the high school section of the Illinois State Normal School at Normal, Illinois, in 1887 and entered Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1895. From 1891-1893, Scott was instructor in Greek in the academy of Northwestern University, and during 1891-1892 he was also a graduate student at Northwestern On Sept.1, 1892, he married Matilda Jane Spring of Centralia, Illinois; they had a daughter, Dorothy Louise, and a son, Frederick Sterling. In 1893 he began graduate work in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at the Johns Hopkins University, where he held the university scholarship in Greek in 1895 and a fellowship in 1895-1896. He was a pupil of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, who in 1885 had edited The Olympian and Pythian Odes of Pindar. Scott received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in June 1897; his dissertation, "A Comparative Study of Hesiod and Pindar," was published in 1898. He returned to Northwestern as an instructor (1897), became professor of Greek (1901), and in 1904 he was named chairman of the department of classical languages. With the exception of his dissertation, The Unity of Homer (the Sather Classical Lectures he delivered in 1921) was his first book. From it stemmed Homer and His Influence (1925) and The Poetic Structure of the Odyssey, the Martin Classical Lectures, published in 1931. The Unity of Homer was influential in turning the direction of Homeric studies in the United States from the German school of separatists to a new school of unitarians. Scott was by nature partisan, and he devoted himself to the uncompromising defence of Homer as the author of the two great poems.