Anderson, George K.

George Kumler Anderson (1901-1980), professor of English, was born in Springfield, Illinois, on October 20, 1901. His early life was spent in China, Brazil, and Hong Kong, where his father held consular posts, and his formal education began when he entered the Tome School in Maryland at the age of eleven. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy at the age of thirteen, and spent a postgraduate year there before entering Harvard, where he earned three degrees, a bachelor of arts in 1920, a master of arts in 1921, and a Ph.D. in 1925. He taught for several years at George Washington University before coming to Brown as assistant professor in 1927. He was promoted to associate professor in 1930 and professor in 1947. He taught courses in the history of languages, Anglo-Saxon, and Chaucer, and was a very knowledgeable student of Victorian literature, but he was also co-editor of This Generation, a critical study of creative writing between the two World Wars. He taught at the Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English during some summers. Anderson published The Literature of the Anglo-Saxons in 1949, and English Literature from the Beginnings to 1485 in 1950. In 1945 he was granted a Guggenheim fellowship for research on the legend of the Wandering Jew, which culminated in The Legend of the Wandering Jew, published in 1965. He was chairman of the Department of English from 1950 to 1960, and retired in 1972. He died on January 2, 1980 in Providence.