Guide to the Paul Shorey Papers 1865-1934


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Table of Contents

• Descriptive Summary
• Information on Use
• Access
• Citation
• Biographical Note
• Scope Note
• Related Resources
• Subject Headings
• INVENTORY
• Series I: Daniel Shorey Biographical
• Series II Correspondence
• Series III: Identified Lectures and Addresses
• Series IV: Notes and Lectures
  • Subseries 1: Classics, general, Greek
  • Subseries 2: Plato and Platonism
  • Subseries 3: Aristotle and Aristotelianism
  • Subseries 4: Non-classics
• Series V: Greek MSS Photostats
• Series VI: Publications
  • Subseries 1: Typescript Drafts
  • Subseries 2: Final Typescripts, Articles, By Title
  • Subseries 3: Final Typescripts, Reviews, By Title
  • Subseries 4: Reprints, By Title
  • Subseries 5: Bound Reprints
• Series VII: Writings by Others
• Series VIII: Memorabilia
  • Subseries 1: Harvard
  • Subseries 2: Berlin
  • Subseries 3: General
  • Subseries 4: Honorary Degrees and Certificates

Descriptive Summary

Information on Use

Access

No restrictions

Citation

When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Shorey, Paul. Papers, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library Biographical Note

Biographical Note

Paul Shorey, Professor of Greek Language and Literature, was born on August 3, 1857, in Davenport, Iowa. The family moved to Chicago in 1865 where his father, Daniel Lewis Shorey, established a successful law practice and eventually was elected alderman. In 1874, Paul entered Harvard, his father's alma mater, where he undertook a course of classics, history and philosophy, graduating with highest honors in those fields. After his graduation in 1878, he studied law with his father and was admitted to the bar in 1879. For the next two years, the younger Shorey was employed as a notary public and the director of the Des Moines and Minneapolis Railroad Company, but he became bored with the legal profession and, in 1881, began advanced studies in the classics as a non-matriculating student at the University of Leipzig under a Kirkland Fellowship from Harvard. In 1882-83, Shorey was among the members of the first class of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. There was no formal course of study at that time, but he was interested enough to enroll at the University of Munich in the fall of 1883. After some disagreement with the faculty there over the suitability of his proposed thesis subjects, he convinced Wilhelm von Christ to direct his research, and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1884. His dissertation was titled, De Platonis idearum doctrina atque mentis humanae notionibus commentatio.

Despite his superior abilities and credentials, Paul Shorey had difficulty finding a professional position; while investigating academic possibilities, he wrote reviews and considered working on a literary journal. In 1885, however, the dean of the newly founded women's college, Bryn Mawr, offered him an assistant professorship in Latin and philosophy. The association was one which Shorey would afterward remember fondly: he enjoyed his teaching responsibilities and was quickly promoted to a full professorship. The publication of his first article in a professional journal, The American Journal of Philology, led to a close friendship with the editor, Basil Gildersleeve, one of the country's foremost classical scholars.

In 1885, Judge Daniel Shorey had moved to Hyde Park where he made the acquaintance of William Rainey Harper, who was then on the faculty of the Baptist Seminary in Morgan Park. Judge Shorey became a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago in 1890; he was the chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee and served on various other committees, sometimes providing informal legal advice, until his death in 1899. Harper recognized in Paul Shorey the scholarly acumen and initiative necessary to shape a superior faculty and program at the proposed university and offered to make him head professor of either Greek or philosophy; Shorey served as the head of the Greek department until 1927, while also presiding over the editorial board of Classical Philology, the department's prestigious journal, from 1906 to 1934. In 1895, he married one of his graduate students, Emma Large Gilbert. Miss Gilbert had come to the University on a fellowship to study Latin with William Gardner Hale, Shorey's colleague in Latin.

In 1896, Paul Shorey published his first non-classical article, "Present Conditions of Literary Production." In the years that followed, Shorey gained a nation-wide reputation as a man of letters and an eloquent spokesman for education. "The Case for the Classics" was published in 1910, the same year that he served as president of the American Philological Association. Seven years later, "The Assault on Humanism" thrust Shorey into the limelight in a debate over the philosophy, methods, and aims of education in the modern world with such advocates of the "new" education as Abraham Flexner, Charles Eliot, and John Dewey. Throughout his career, Shorey was much sought after as a popular speaker for dinner meetings, commencements and clubs, and his articles and reviews appeared in a wide range of national publications.

Shorey's popularity as a speaker was matched by his success as a professional scholar. His prolific publishing included four major books: Horace: Odes and Epodes, The Unity of Plato's Thought, What Plato Said, and the Loeb edition of Plato's Republic. A fifth, What Plato Meant, was in the planning stage when he died. Shorey held numerous visiting professorships and delivered many series of addresses on the classics, Plato, and Aristotle, comparative literature and philosophy, and cultural history. In 1911, he delivered six lectures on "Greek and English Poetry" at the Harrison Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania. These coincided with six lectures on "The Platonic Tradition in Philosophy and Literature" at Columbia University. The following year Shorey was awarded the Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectureship at Johns Hopkins and was also named the Gardiner.

Martin Lane Lecturer at Harvard. In both cases he delivered a series of six lectures, "The Greek Epigram and the Palantine Anthology" as Turnbull Lecturer and "Life and Letters at Athens from Pericles to Alexander" as Lane Lecturer.

Shorey's international reputation as a scholar of Plato and Aristotle resulted in his being named the Roosevelt Exchange Professor in Berlin for the year 1913-14. He directed a graduate seminar on Aristotle's De Anima and lectured extensively on the literary and cultural history of America to a broad public audience. Of at least thirty separate addresses given in Berlin, less than a dozen have survived, and of the graduate seminar itself, only opening and concluding remarks remain. The choice of Shorey for this post was a controversial one: never a man to conceal his opinions, he had made numerous strong criticisms of German scholarship and the attitude that produced and pervaded it. The proposed subject of his seminar was twice rejected by Wilamowitz von Moellendorff before a consensus was reached, and the year began with a great deal of tension on both sides. As newspapers and journals ultimately attested, however, Shorey achieved a great success in Berlin, and his anti-German criticisms were forgotten in the wake of his wit and learning.

In 1916, Shorey delivered both the Lowell Institute lectures in Boston, where he spoke on "Six Aspects of Platonism in European Literature," and the Norman Wait Harris lectures at Northwestern University dealing with the development of ethical and spiritual religion in Greek literature. The latter were greatly revised and presented at a Columbia University summer series of lectures on the permanent value of Greek literature. In 1916, Shorey was also Sather lecturer at Berkeley for the first time; he held this honor three times in all, eventually refusing Benjamin Ide Wheeler's extraordinary offer to make him the "permanent" Sather lecturer. Some of Shorey's Sathers survive in manuscript form, and the third Sather series was revised by Shorey and Costas for publication under the title Platonism: Ancient and Modern. Shorey's Sather topics included "The Broader Aspects of Platonism and its Significance for European Literature" (1916); "Aristotle and Aristotelianism" (1919); and "History of Platonism" (1928). In 1923, the Henry Lynn Moore Foundation invited Shorey to deliver the Dartmouth Alumni Lectures and he responded with a series on "Greek Thinkers and Modern Thought". Shorey traveled to Belgium and France the next year to lecture and to accept an honorary degree from the University of Liège, one of eleven honorary degrees he received in law, language, and letters.

Perhaps no lecture had a more immediate effect on Shorey's career than the one delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa of Cornell University on December 6, 1927, on the subject, "Can an American Be an Optimist?" The publication of this address precipitated an editorial in the New York Times, "Secretaries for Shorey," which coincided with the University of Chicago's receipt of a $250,000 grant from the General Education Board for research in the humanities. Shorey was awarded $25,000 of this grant to fund five years of research on his "Platonic Studies" project which resulted in the publication of the well-received What Plato Said (1933). The General Education Board grant also laid the groundwork for a corresponding treatment of Aristotle which was unfortunately never completed.

In the final years of his life, Shorey continued to teach and lecture and brought to near completion many of the larger scholarly projects of his life: he completed Plato: Republic, Vol. I, for the Loeb Library in 1933, but Platonism: Ancient and Modern and Plato: Republic, Vol. II had to be edited by two of his colleagues, Procope Costas and Stella Lange. In December of 1933, Shorey suffered a paralyzing stroke from which he recovered sufficiently in the following months to return to his office in the quadrangles during the Winter Quarter of 1934. A second stroke in mid-April of that year left him in a coma from which he did not regain consciousness. He died at home in Hyde Park on April 24, 1934; the letters of condolence, tributes and articles that followed demonstrated the quality and the extent of his effect upon his contemporaries.

Scope Note

Series I: Daniel Shorey, contains manuscripts and memorabilia of Judge Daniel Lewis Shorey, a member of the original University of Chicago Board of Trustees and an associate of William Rainey Harper. Included are occasional speeches on legal as well as literary topics, briefs, and reprints. The memorabilia includes certificates of counsel, Columbian Exposition souvenirs, published obituaries, and a transcript of the eulogy delivered at Judge Shorey's funeral.

Series II: Correspondence, comprises five folders of correspondence to Paul Shorey, mostly concerning lectureships and articles in the popular press. Many of the letters are in answer to two articles, "Literature and Modern Life" and "Evolution: A Conservative's Apology." Also included are drafts of some of Shorey's letters and the carbon copy of his letter to David Stevens, associate dean of faculties, reporting the progress of the "Platonic Studies" project, one of several University of Chicago projects in the humanities funded by the General Education Board grant.

Series III: Lectures and Speeches comprises those manuscripts and typescripts which can be positively identified with Shorey's numerous visiting professorships and lecture series; in no case, however, has an entire series survived, and it is impossible to ascertain how finished these pieces are. The major lecture series represented here are: Belgium, 1924; Berlin, 1913-14; Dartmouth, 1923; Lowell Institute, 1916; Sather, 1916 and 1928. Also included in this series are single lectures whose occasion is known and lectures to specific groups, such as the local chapters of Phi Beta Kappa and Bryn Mawr students and alumnae.

Series IV: Notes and Lectures is divided into four main categories-Classics, Plato, Aristotle, Non-classics. The first subseries, Classics, includes both Greek and Latin. Because of Shorey's reputation in and focus on the study of Greek philosophy, separate subseries have been established for Plato and Aristotle. Arrangement within these subseries is generally by subject matter: Greek tragedians, for example, are grouped together and followed by Shorey's notes on drama and metrics. Notes or lectures on particular texts, such as Plato's dialogs and the spurious works, are arranged alphabetically by title. The often fragmentary or unclear focus of these discussions has resulted in the creation of more general entries such as, "the good" or "modernisms." The fourth subseries, "Non-classics," contains much of what is most significant in the collection. As a popular writer and critic as well as an entertaining and thoughtful speaker, Shorey's impact upon his generation was felt in circles much wider than those delineated by the University of Chicago or classical scholarship, and his popularity and success outside those circles demonstrate the accuracy with which he judged his audiences as well as the common outlook they shared. The speeches on non-classical topics are primarily concerned with education, comparative literature, culture and philosophy, and language. Shorey sometimes addressed larger audiences through the radiobroadcasting media; two of these broadcasts survive in typescript form. He also spoke on political and social topics and, on a lighter note, was not above delivering charming accounts of his earliest visits to Greece and Rome.

Series V: Greek Manuscript Photostats comprises three boxes of photostatic reproductions of manuscripts of a Greek text, De vitiosa verecundia commentariolus, as well as a Photostat of an early printed edition of the work. The individual manuscripts have not been identified.

Series VI: Publications comprises five subseries-Typescript Drafts, Final Typescripts-Articles, Final Typescripts-Reviews, Reprints, Bound Reprints-of materials known to be connected with Shorey's extensive body of published works. The first subseries, Typescript Drafts, contains chapter drafts, in varying states of completeness, of three of Shorey's books: Platonism: Ancient and Modern (46:7-47:6); What Plato Said (47:7-8); and Plato: Republic, Vol. I (48:5). Shorey's notes for and drafts of "Evolution: A Conservative's Apology" are also included in this subseries (48:6-8). The second subseries is divided into smaller articles and reviews; these are arranged in alphabetical order by title, as are the reprints of the following subseries. The bound reprints comprise 8 volumes of Shorey's shorter, miscellaneous works, many of which are not mentioned in the scholarly bibliographies due to the more general nature of their topics. An index to the miscellaneous papers is foldered with the set; volume two is unfortunately missing.

Series VII: Writings by others, comprises student papers and notes submitted to Shorey in his capacity as editor of Classical Philology for possible publication in the journal. The notes are arranged alphabetically by author's name.

Series VIII: Memorabilia contains three sub-series: Harvard, Berlin, and General, which is, with the exception of some materials relating to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, all University of Chicago-related. The Harvard memorabilia includes grade reports, photographs, and the published reports of the class secretary. Also included are a typescript of Shorey's valedictory address and a copy of a book of Harvard Lampoon cartoons. The Berlin subseries begins with newspaper clippings about Shorey's selection and tenure as the Roosevelt Visiting Professor in 1913-14 and includes Shorey's account of his year there. These are followed by various souvenirs, such as the announcements of his lecture series, invitations to parties in his honor, and newspaper clippings. The final sub-series contains University and personal memorabilia. Included are programs from his many lecture series, invitations to convocations and meetings, and a small collection of newspaper clippings, many of them dealing with literature and culture. Significant information about the conception and development of the Departments of Latin and Greek at Chicago is contained in the notebook of the minutes of the Classics Conference, 1899-1905. Shorey's frequent appearances in the public eye are documented by the collection of newspaper and magazine articles about him; numerous obituaries and tributes are found in the final folders of the collection. The memorabilia also includes boxed but not further identified items: two of the medals and six of the academic hoods awarded to Paul Shorey in the course of his career.

Related Resources

The following related resources are located in the Department of Special Collections:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/select.html

Additional information relating to Paul Shorey can be found in the following collections: Records of the Humanities Division Research Grants, 1926-1944, 4:7; William Rainey Harper Papers, 14:34; Presidents' Papers, 1889-1925, 60:21. Further information about Judge Daniel Shorey is contained in the Presidents' Papers, 1889-1925, 65:23.

Additional Shorey material is located at the Newberry Library which has correspondence between Paul Shorey and various German academics from 1914-1915 concerning the outbreak of World War I within the Miscellaneous Manuscripts-Small Collections. The William Morton Payne papers at the Newberry also contain Shorey correspondence dating from 1874 to 1919

Subject Headings

• Shorey, Paul, 1857-1934
• Shorey, Daniel Lewis
• Plato
• Aristotle
• Philosophy, Ancient
• Greek literature

INVENTORY