Clough, Benjamin C.

Benjamin Crocker Clough (1889-1975), professor of English and classics, was born in Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard on November 19, 1889. He went “off island” to continue his education at Harvard, where he received his A.B. degree in 1911, his A.M. in 1918, and his Ph.D. in 1921 for a study of the writings of John Donne. He served as assistant in the English Department at Brown from 1913 to 1915, instructor from 1915 to 1917 and again from 1920 to 1922, and was promoted to assistant professor in 1922. He left the English Department for Classics in 1924 as assistant professor of Greek and Latin classics, and became associate professor in 1926, head of the Classics Department in 1929, and David Benedict professor in 1930. He published The American Imagination at Work, an anthology of folk tales, and Tall Tales and Folk Tales, both in 1947. His own imagination was often at work, as some of his articles in scholarly journals were ascribed to Josiah Carberry (q.v). Clough, an intimate of Carberry from his beginning, was the curator of the papers of that ubiquitous professor, and, although the Providence Journal refused to print items about Carberry, it did accept over twelve hundred book reviews by Ben Clough. He retired in 1949. He died on August 30, 1975 in Smithfield, Rhode Island.