University of Virginia Library

I

Fredson Thayer Bowers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 25 April 1905, the son of Fredson Eugene Bowers and Hattie May Quigley. He was the only child of this couple, but he had two half-sisters, Ruth and Rita Brownell, from his mother's previous marriage. The Bowers name belonged to one of the oldest Connecticut families. A John Bower (or Bowers) moved to New Haven in the 165os from Massachusetts (where the family went back to the 163os) and became in 1672 the first minister in Derby, Connecticut; "Bowers" was therefore regarded as one of New Haven's "ancient" names (as in the first volume of Donald Lines Jacobus's Families of Ancient New Haven, 1923). In later life Bowers took some interest in his family's history but never investigated it, and he lamented the fact that the results of his uncle Thomas's genealogical researches had apparently not been preserved. He was unable to connect his family to the early one with certainty; but because his father was born in Derby, he liked to believe that the connection existed. His middle name, Thayer, figured in his paternal grandmother's family, and he was proud of its being "a good New England name, among the best in fact" (as he put it in a letter of 1 April 1988 to his eldest son, Fredson Thayer Bowers, Jr.—whose son, Fredson Thayer Bowers III, he hoped would in turn carry on the tradition).

At the time of Bowers's birth, the family lived in the shadow of Yale at 161 Whalley Avenue, and his father was president (and his uncle Thomas secretary-treasurer) of the Gilbert Manufacturing Company, one of a half-dozen corset-manufacturing companies in New Haven. It was a family business, Gilbert being his paternal grandmother's maiden name; but his father and uncle were early enthusiasts for automobiles and seemed to care more about cars than corsets. In 1904 or 1905 they

added to the company's products such fabric items for automobile passengers as aprons, covers, and leggins, and about 1906—07 his father established the F. E. Bowers Company, Inc., as a manufacturer of carburetors and motor parts. Bowers was only one year old when the automotive activities of his father and uncle were publicized in a local magazine under the heading "Big Autos of the Town" (Saturday Chronicle, 28 July 1906)—a brief article illustrated with photographs of the brothers in their cars. Thomas G. Bowers was shown in the 30-horsepower machine that had been constructed to his specifications from parts he had purchased on a trip; and Fredson E. Bowers was pictured in his 25-horsepower Rambler, which had a "French grey" body of his own design and was "One of the handsomest and speediest high powered runabouts seen about the city." F. E. Bowers and his mechanic could be observed "nearly every night burning up the roads in New Haven county," and one is tempted to think that he sometimes took his son for rides and that this early acquaintance with automobiles was the origin of Bowers's lifelong devotion to sports cars. (He owned a succession of them, including a Jaguar, an Alfa-Romeo, and a Mercedes; and his many nonstop drives to distant places were—whether intentionally or not—in the tradition of his father's fondness for long automobile trips.) Bowers was not quite six when his father died (on 9 February 1911, at the age of thirty-nine, while attending the Chicago Automobile Show), bringing the brief existence of the F. E. Bowers Company to an end; but the aura of automobile enthusiasm continued as a presence in his life through his uncle and the fact that the ongoing Gilbert Manufacturing Company had by 1909 switched exclusively to automobile-related fabrics (the corset business being set up separately as the Gilbert Corset Company).

Just before F. E. Bowers's death, the family had moved to West Haven, but Hattie Bowers, as a widow, soon went back to New Haven and then, in late 1913 or 1914, married Charles K. Groesbeck, a stenographer at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Bowers thus had a stepfather during all his high-school and college years (in fact, Groesbeck's death on 13 June 1925 came just four days before Bowers's graduation from college; his mother later took a fourth husband, George Bassermann). At this time the family lived at 111 Brownell Street, within walking distance of New Haven High Public School, which—at York Square—was adjacent to Yale and the old New Haven cemetery. In high school Bowers took—besides the usual courses in composition, literature, chemistry, and geometry—two years of French, three of German, and two and a half of algebra (the latter perhaps foreshadowing his interest in bibliographical collation formulas). In the summers he enjoyed outdoor

activities at camp, and he worked in a camp the summers before and after his senior year (as he described in a letter of 10 March 1980 to his oldest son): Bowers graduated from New Haven General High School (as it was then called) in 1921 and decided on Brown University as the place for his college work.

In the autumn of 1921, at the age of sixteen, Bowers entered the freshman class at Brown, where he majored in English; following an introductory survey of English literature, he studied contemporary novels with Kenneth O. Mason, Romantic literature with Percy Marks, Shakespeare with George Wyllys Benedict, the English novel with Albert Knight Potter, and modern English drama with Thomas Crosby, and in his senior year he was one of the undergraduates admitted into Walter C. Bronson's special graduate seminar. He also took basic courses in biology, astronomy, philosophy, history, economics, music, Latin, Greek, and Spanish, as well as more advanced courses in mathematics and French. The year-long music course that he attended in his junior year is worth noting because it no doubt played some role in causing music, and the detailed analysis of it, to be an important element in his later life; this class, taught by Gene Wilder Ware, the university organist, was designed (in the words of the catalogue) for students "who wish to acquire an intelligent understanding and enjoyment of good music." Bowers's marks were sufficient to bring him scholarships, "preliminary honors," and junior-year election to Phi Beta Kappa. In his first three years he received all As in his English courses (with a few lower grades in some of the other subjects), but his marks were distinctly less good in his senior year, no doubt because of his many extracurricular activities.

In that year he was editor-in-chief of the Daily Herald (the student newspaper), leader of the Glee Club (and thus co-director of the program for concert tours through New England and a larger tour that included Detroit, Kent, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New York, and Hartford), vice president of the Sphinx Club (a small faculty-student

group that met for discussion), and a member of the Varsity Quartet (as a bass), the Banjo Club (and its Hawaiian Trio), the Cammarian Club (a student governing board), and the editorial boards of the Brown Jug (the student humor magazine, which sold widely outside Brown) and Casements (the student literary magazine, which also contained work by established writers and which was distributed nationally through certain bookstores and newsstands). From his sophomore year on, he had been active in the campus musical clubs and in the English Club (a small group of a dozen or so that met every few weeks to discuss literary matters and hear papers, such as his 15 October 1924 paper on Vanity Fair), as well as in several other clubs and his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. To earn money for living expenses, he also led a small jazz band, playing saxophone and Hawaiian guitar himself. (The difficulties of putting together sufficient money at this time may in part underlie the thriftiness that was one of his lifelong characteristics.) The student yearbook, Liber Brunensis, offered this assessment of him at the end of his senior year: Those who knew him later in his life will not be surprised by these comments or by the energy level reflected in his college record.

The most important extracurricular activity of his senior year was not mentioned in the yearbook: in the fall of that year, at the age of nineteen, he got married. On 11 November 1924, at St. Ignatius (Protestant Episcopal) Church in New York, he wed Hyacinth Adeline Sutphen, a 1924 graduate of Smith College (a French major) and a member of a New York Social Register family that was descended from Dirck van Zutphen, a seventeenth-century Dutch settler in New Amsterdam. She was two years and four months older than Bowers (born 18 December 1902), the youngest of four children of John Schureman Sutphen and Mary Tier Brown, and had lived with her parents at their place in Ormond, Florida, as well as at 311 West 72nd Street in New York (not far from St. Ignatius Church, at West End Avenue and 87th Street). Perhaps because of her social standing, the marriage was written up in the New York Times (13 November 1924), in an article headed "Brown Senior Weds Hyacinth Sutphen: F. T. Bowers, Rhodes Scholarship Candidate, and Smith College Student Marry Secretly." Some of the

circumstances of the secrecy, though not the background of it, were described: After a brief honeymoon at Hot Springs, Virginia, Bowers was again immersed in his hectic round of activities at Brown.

Aside from his marriage, the most notable aspect of his undergraduate life, particularly in light of his later career, is the large amount of writing he produced. In addition to an introductory composition course, he took a year-long intermediate course in his sophomore year and a year-long advanced one in his senior year, the former taught by Percy Marks and the latter by George Wyllys Benedict. Under Marks's encouragement, the students in his class brought out an anthology of their classwork in late May 1923. Bowers was one of three editors of The Anthology of English 3,4, and the piece of his included in it was a short story called "Release," about the suicide of a young opium addict, whose life had always been in a world of dreams and whose final dream was of a "grinning idiot" who "sang the idle tale of life" and pulled "the gossamer strings that made men love and hate, kill and destroy," wailing futilely as the universe "plunged to destruction through icy aeons of space."

Marks, a popular young professor, was at that time working on his first novel, The Plastic Age, which after publication in early 1924 became a best seller (and later a film), famous for its portrayal of jazz-age college life and its emphasis on alcohol and sex. Everyone at Brown assumed that the novel depicted the local scene (the review in Casements said that it "tells the truth"), and it apparently cost Marks his job. (An editorial in the Herald on 26 May 1924—after Bowers had become editor on 3 May—called the loss of Marks "a decided blow to the many men who have taken courses with him.") However much "Sanford College" in the novel was in fact based on Brown (or on Dartmouth, where Marks had previously taught), the book probably did reflect the literary situation at Brown in Bowers's time, as in passages like the following:

This assessment is supported, from various sources, by Jay Martin in his 1970 biography of Nathanael West, who was in the Brown class of 1924: "Between 1922 and 1924," he says, "Brown was genuinely invaded by modern ideas," producing a "literary awakening" (p. 66). That Marks showed this element of Ivy League college life along with the partying and the snobbishness makes his account considerably more subtle than Upton Sinclair's characterization of Brown—in another contemporary book, The Goose-Step (1923)—as an institution ("almost as snobbish as Princeton") "catering to the sons of the plutocracy" with "a regime of intellectual dry-rot" (pp. 309-310). Although Bowers was one of the students with whom Marks was familiar while the novel was in progress, there is no character in it that seems obviously based on him. The hero, who plans to go to Harvard for graduate work, makes the "long trip" to New York just before graduation to propose marriage to the woman he had taken to the prom the year before, and he is rejected; Bowers's very different excursion to New York to get married occurred ten months after the book was published.

Bowers, however, did use the widespread knowledge of Marks's book as the background for twenty-six lines in heroic couplets, entitled "The Plastic Age," which he published in the Brown Jug in February 1925. The opening and closing went as follows:

The "headache" no doubt reflected Bowers's own experience, for in later life he told stories about his special recipe for bathtub gin in college. Although he apparently contributed unsigned items (as a "Juggler") to six issues of the Brown Jug, his only other signed piece was a free-verse poem, "A Coat of Arms for Prom Hosts" (May 1924), in pseudo-antique English.

In his junior year Bowers appeared three times in Casements, the second appearance causing a considerable sensation. His piece in the January 1924 number (published in December 1923), entitled "The Passing Show," consisted of brief parodies of Frederick O'Brien, Theodore Dreiser, Amy Lowell, and D. H. Lawrence. In the Lawrence parody (based on the rabbit scene in Women in Love, the trade printing of which had been published in America fourteen months before), a man and a woman, standing by a rabbit pen, look at each other "sensually," and "the white arctic snow in him was lit with a rosy flush of passion, like fingers of sunset glow creeping across barren, white wastes." Then they watch a male rabbit "vigorously trying to overtake his frailer paramour," chasing her into "the dusky, dark gloomness" of the rabbit house:

This kind of writing was unacceptable to city officials in Providence, and on 22 December the Assistant City Solicitor, declaring the parody to be "clearly obscene and unfit for public reading," ordered that copies of the issue be withdrawn from sale and that uncooperative booksellers and newsdealers be prosecuted (as the Boston Globe reported in some detail the next day).

Bowers suspected that his piece was called to the attention of the authorities by his classmate S. J. Perelman as a prank. Many years later Bowers wrote to Dorothy Herrmann, while she was working on her biography of Perelman (1986), describing the episode:

Certainly Bowers and Perelman knew each other well at that time, being fellow members of the English and Sphinx clubs and fellow contributors to the Herald, and their college careers continued to intersect. A few months later, when Bowers was chairman of the committee for the 1924 St. Patrick's Day Vaudeville Show (in part a parody of The Plastic Age, and one of the "bawdiest productions ever to be staged at Brown," according to Herrmann), Perelman was the set designer for it—and Quentin Reynolds one of the writers, and Nathanael West an actor in it. (The Herald on 27 March called it "undoubtedly the greatest single theatrical production and the finest example of histrionic art ever seen on the campus.") The following year, when Bowers edited the Herald, Perelman was editor of the Brown Jug; and Bowers, perhaps in retaliation for the Casements affair, attacked Perelman's handling of the Jug (on 22 November 1924 and 6 January 1925) and initiated an editorial feud between the two publications. (The Herald's [i.e., Bowers's?] criticism of the Jug for being imitative of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan reinforces Percy Marks's later recollection of his students' papers: "A bundle of themes turned into an American Mercury in my hand" [The Craft of Writing, 1932].)

Bowers's other contributions to Casements, in the numbers for November 1923 and March 1924, were less controversial than his parodies, but perhaps more revealing. The earlier one, "The Street That Ends in the Sea," was a short allegorical piece describing the movements of people roaming a street of shops, with its "crooked bylanes," that led to a "shimmering blue" sea ("promising rest"), which some people glanced at "furtively" and others seemed not to notice at all. The other piece, "Whitney Warren," was a five-page story describing the thoughts going through the mind of a man as he was being hanged for murder. (The naming of the title character suggests that architecture was not one of the arts Bowers followed closely; otherwise he would presumably not have used the name of one of the prominent architects of the day, a partner in the firm of Warren & Wetmore and designer of the facade of Grand Central Terminal.) Whether Warren's thoughts were Bowers's own is difficult to say, but the story can plausibly be seen as an undergraduate's proclamation of his rejection of conventional religion and morality. The title character had "felt no desire" to talk to the chaplain but "had gone through with the interview as an inescapable part of the

necessary rigmarole"; his philosophy "had finally matured and hardened into a strange mixture of materialism and individualism." As he died, he Like Whitney Warren, Bowers may also have "often tried to imagine the beginning of the whole colossal system of the universe"; and he perhaps sympathized with Warren's feeling that he "had loved words and their magic power almost as well as he had loved life itself."

At any rate, words were the subject of the one undergraduate piece of Bowers's that reached a sizable national audience. The 14 March 1925 number of the widely circulated Literary Digest, under the heading "College Slang a Language All Its Own," reprinted an article that Bowers had written, "as summarized by the Providence Journal and the Brooklyn Eagle." In the article as printed there, Bowers wrote that college "slanguage" was "like a foreign tongue even to the graduate of a few years ago, and entirely unintelligible to the outside public." One of the examples he provided was an imaginary conversation beginning, "Why, hello Jim, you're looking pretty smooth to-night. Where'd you get the doggy scarf? Old Joe Brooks himself, aren't you." Whether this article derived from one of Bowers's editorials in the Daily Herald is not certain, but there was an editorial on 23 February 1925 entitled "Diction on the Campus," complaining about college slang, which is "unintelligible to the average man," and lecturing its readers rather pompously on their "responsibility for the precious heritage of the English tongue" (it did not, however, give examples of slang).

Bowers must have written many of the editorials during his senior year, and many news stories during his four years on the staff. But most Herald articles were unsigned, and his have not been identified, except for a series of five reviews signed "F.T.B." In a review of Casements, he noted that "S. J. Perelman contributes a divagation in his best manner" (6 May 1924); another review judged May Sinclair's Arnold Waterlow to show "a psychological intuition and perception almost unrivalled among modern authors" (30 September 1924); Anne Douglas Sedgwick's The Little French Girl was "one of the best novels of the present age" (7 October 1924); Ernest Brace's Commencement achieved "a real and interesting picture of life" (10 November 1924); and Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren contained "a breadth of life which can almost

be said to be complete" (24 March 1925). Even without knowing more of his Herald pieces, one can nevertheless say that the fluency Bowers gained from all his undergraduate writing, as well as the discipline of meeting deadlines and administering a periodical, proved valuable to him later on.

Bowers graduated from Brown with a Ph.B. on 17 June 1925 and turned his thoughts to graduate school at Harvard. He and his wife moved into 10 Dana Street, Cambridge, and he began his coursework in the fall of 1925. It was natural, given his English major at Brown and his interest in writing, that his graduate work would be in English; what led him to concentrate on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in his first year, however, is not as evident. But after taking George Lyman Kittredge's Shakespeare course and J. Tucker Murray's pre-1642 non-Shakespearean drama course that year, his direction was set. Kittredge made a deep impression on him, and he eventually wrote his dissertation under Kittredge's direction. More than half a century later Bowers recalled with admiration the characteristics of Kittredge's teaching. In the preface to his collected essays on Shakespeare (1989), he said that the essays "share a common background from the active teaching of a relatively few plays in the Kittredge manner of close analysis although with a different focus from his":

Murray's teaching was also influential: Bowers said in the preface to his dissertation that the topic "would never have been undertaken had not I among so many others fallen under the spell of Professor John Tucker Murray's enthusiasm for the Elizabethan drama"; and a term paper for Murray, growing out of A. H. Thorndike's 1902 PMLA article on "The Relations of Hamlet to the Contemporary Revenge Play," became the germ for the dissertation.

Other glimpses of Bowers's study at Harvard occasionally crop up in later writings—as when, in an obituary of Greg (1959), he said, "In the United States of the late 1920's my generation cut its teeth on McKerrow's

Introduction." Another time (in a letter on 18 April 1976), he commented on one of his critics by saying that "he does not know of the philological training one got at Harvard in my day!" This training consisted, in Bowers's case, of a year of Anglo-Saxon (under Kittredge, F. N. Robinson, and Kenneth G. T. Webster), two years of Middle English (one on Chaucer and one on other literature of the period, both taught by Robinson and John S. P. Tatlock), a year of Old French ("Phonology and Inflections" taught by J. D. M. Ford), and a half-year of "Gothic—Introduction to the Study of German Philology" (under R. M. S. Heffner)—the latter a course he postponed taking until the fall of 1931.

The other major influence on him at Harvard, besides Kittredge and Murray, was Hyder Edward Rollins, whose year-long course in Elizabethan nondramatic poetry he took in 1927-28, his third year. (Howard Mumford Jones later said that Rollins, "in many minds the successor of Kittredge, was the idol of the graduate students" [An Autobiography, 1979, p. 204].) At the end of this course, on 3 May 1928, Bowers submitted a remarkable paper of 338 typed pages bound in hard cover—bound at the time he turned it in, for Rollins's comment is on the front free endpaper. Entitled "The Authorship of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres," the paper argued against B. M. Ward's suggestion that some of the poems were by other persons than Gascoigne. In his ten-line comment, Rollins said, "A very remarkable study for a mere course-thesis. . . . Congratulations on your interest and industry and intelligence!" Not surprisingly, he gave the paper a grade of A; less expected was his final comment, "Gratifying, too, to see that you write much more carefully since the December jolt!" Presumably the jolt was a severe criticism from him (and perhaps also from Kittredge, with whom Bowers was taking an independent-study course at the same time). Bowers's facility in writing sometimes resulted in a diffuseness that was to be a problem throughout his life, and apparently he was warned about it at this point. The Gascoigne paper is of particular interest for its focus on authorship (which naturally has bibliographical and textual implications) and for such bibliographical knowledge as it reveals—the use of title-page transcription and signature reference notation, for instance. It also contains what is probably the earliest surviving indication of his awareness of W. W. Greg's work: in criticizing Ward's theory of an Oxford code, he said, "Now I protest, even though Greg thinks it good, that this is not an honest cipher" (p. 299).

Most of his course-related writing during these years obviously dealt with Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and no doubt underlay his

earliest scholarly publications, which began in 1930, while he was engaged in writing his dissertation. His first scholarly article, in the March 1930 number of Modern Language Notes, argued that the anonymous poetic satire Machiavells Dogge (1617) was in fact by Nicholas Breton; the argument used no physical bibliographical evidence but instead relied entirely on the existence of many borrowed passages from an established Breton work and on similarities of tone and style. One of Rollins's editions was cited in a footnote, and an acknowledgment of Rollins's help was made in Bowers's next publication, "Kyd's Pedringano: Sources and Parallels" in Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature for 1931. Bowers appeared twice more in Harvard Studies, in 1933 and 1934, both articles dealing with attribution of authorship: the earlier ruled out Chapman as author of Alphonsus, and the later was a condensed version of the Gascoigne paper he had written for Rollins (who was one of the editors of Harvard Studies as of 1934). He also published twice more at this time in Modern Language Notes (in 1932 and 1933), referring on the second occasion to Kittredge's assistance, and he placed a substantial article in Studies in Philology (1934).

These three pieces dealt with revenge tragedy and were offshoots of his dissertation, "A History of Elizabethan Revengeful Tragedy." (In his preface he credited the origin of his title to a mistaken footnote in Allardyce Nicoll's Restoration Drama, citing a nonexistent book supposedly called "History of Revengeful Drama.") He pursued this topic with the same thoroughness he had displayed in the Gascoigne paper; and in January 1934, after some five years' work, he presented his committee with an 1100-page study (bound in three volumes), dedicated "gratefully" to Kittredge, and was officially awarded his Ph.D. degree in February. His primary acknowledgments (besides the one to Murray) were naturally to Kittredge ("for his unfailing interest, his multitude of valuable suggestions, his careful reading of my manuscript, and for the stimulating hours I have spent in discussion with him") and Rollins ("for reading part of this thesis, for various valuable suggestions, and for his constant inspiration to me as a model of modern scholarship"). At the end of his list he added, "my deepest gratitude is due my wife who undertook, during years of listening to an idée fixe, the arduous work of typing this thesis." The main text consisted of two large sections, one on "The Theory and Practice of Revenge" (a third of the whole), tracing the concept back to antiquity, followed by one on "The Elizabethan Tragedy of Revenge" (some 650 pages), containing (after a discussion of "Antecedents") separate treatments of sixty-five plays. His own four-page epitome of the dissertation appeared in the Summaries of Theses, but an

even more condensed statement in his own words can be found in a footnote to his Studies in Philology article: "I am at present completing a history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy from the particular point of view of its relation to the life and ethics of the time and their effect upon its structure, characterization, and ethics." Six years later a shortened version of this work became his first scholarly book.

During his nine years of graduate study, he taught at Harvard every year but the first and the last two; while taking courses his title was Assistant in English, and while writing his dissertation he was Instructor in English and Tutor in the Modern Languages. He stayed on in the latter position for two years following the award of his degree and traveled to England in the summer between them (1935) on a Charles Dexter Scholarship (he had also been a Dexter Scholar in the summer of 1928, when he had done research for his dissertation at the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the libraries of Emmanuel and Trinity Colleges, Lambeth Palace, and the Guildhall). The Bowerses' first son, Fredson Thayer Bowers, Jr., was born on 7 April 1927, and in mid-1927 the family moved from Dana Street to 5 Concord Avenue. The next year they moved again, to 987 Memorial Drive, where a second child, Joan Sutphen Bowers, was born on 28 February 1931. She later remembered that her father put her to sleep at night by reading Old English poetry to her. One more move, to 110 Forest Avenue in West Newton, came in mid-1931, and on 3 April 1934 twin sons were born, named Peter Dirck Sutphen Bowers and Stephen Hyder Gilbert Bowers (the latter obviously named for Bowers's Harvard adviser Hyder Rollins and his paternal grandmother's family). (The four children made their careers, respectively, in insurance, accounting, finance, and counselling, and they eventually provided Bowers with a total of twenty-two grandchildren.) The move to the suburbs not only accommodated the growing family but allowed Bowers to indulge his love of dogs: the first dog was just a pet for the children, but soon he acquired pure-bred hounds to display in shows. His wife enjoyed golf, tennis, skating, and skiing, and he joined her in these activities and took pictures of her and the children on their various outings. (He later claimed that he gave up golf after he broke par and it no longer seemed a challenge.) His oldest son recently recalled Bowers's enthusiasm for moving pictures:

The pleasures of family life were not destined to continue, however, for the Bowerses began to have marital problems, and they separated in 1935 and were divorced on 29 January 1936. Bowers had moved back into Cambridge, and his wife and the children stayed on in the West Newton house, where she continued to live until near the time of her death from arteriosclerosis on 13 May 1967. (She was married again on 17 October 1940, to Edward Bass Hall, and was divorced from him in 1946.) For the 1936-37 academic year, Bowers accepted an instructorship at Princeton; his move in the summer of 1936 ended an eleven-year association with Harvard, and with an area that held many family memories.

During the Harvard years Bowers developed an interest in Irish wolfhounds and pursued this interest with great intensity, fitting it into a life already crowded with family activities, graduate studies, and teaching. This avocation is the best documented early instance of his drive toward professionalism, or at least mastery and authority, in any field that captured his attention. No doubt this trait of his personality had shown itself previously (and was in part responsible for his energetic undergraduate writing career), but it left its earliest permanent mark in connection with dogs, for his first book was on this subject. In late 1932, at a dog show in Boston, he saw some of the Irish wolfhounds belonging to Charles D. Burrage, Jr. (who was to become one of the prominent breeders of these hounds, at his Rathain Kennels in Needham Heights, not far from where Bowers lived); and as Bowers said in his earliest writing for the American Kennel Gazette (March 1934), "It was a case of love at first sight." He received expert advice both from Burrage and from Frank T. Eskrigge, a veteran dog-show judge and dog-magazine writer who also lived nearby (in Newton Centre); and under their tutelage he made—in the spring of 1933—an impeccable entry into the world of pure-bred dogs by importing a male, Sulhamstead Gala, from Florence Nagle, whose Sulhamstead Kennels (near Reading in

Berkshire) were to become as celebrated a source of champions as she herself was to become a colorful and outspoken figure among dog- and horse-fanciers. A few months later, in the summer of 1933, he bought another male, Whippoorwill Major Kilkelly, bred by Mrs. Amory L. Haskell at her Whippoorwill Kennels in Red Bank, N.J., and at the end of the year he imported a bitch, Sulhamstead Kiora, from Mrs. Nagle. In the March 1934 article he described these three hounds in detail, emphasizing Gala, whose "head has been rather generally admired": "He is a light cream color, with just a suspicion of grey brindle on the underthroat and a tail which darkens to black at the tip." Bowers broke off his description with the comment, "He's so much my favorite that I can't say anything more about him without going into a rhapsody."

The same article provides some delightful glimpses into Bowers's life at this time:

Although one wonders how Bowers could have had "some leisure" during this period, he obviously enjoyed walking the dogs and making them good pets as well as show dogs. His reference here to taking them on sidewalks anticipates another article of his in the American Kennel Gazette a few months later (October 1934) on "Training Dogs for the Street," which is accompanied by six wonderfully evocative photographs of Bowers's dogs, the West Newton neighborhood, Bowers's oldest son (then seven years old), and Bowers himself. Anyone who knew Bowers, or his writings, later can easily imagine that he was good at disciplining his dogs: "I have never," he says in this article, "found the necessity of punishing my dogs, except with a scolding."

By early 1934 Bowers had worked out his plans as a breeder:

Kiora was not in whelp (though Bowers had already advertised for sale "a few Irish Wolfhound puppies imported in utero"), and Bowers's program changed slightly. He bought Top Lady of Ambleside from Mr. and Mrs. L. O. Starbuck's famous Ambleside Kennels of Augusta, Michigan, and bred her to a dog called Brian Boru (owned by Mrs. Randolph C. Grew); on 6 September 1934, Top Lady produced a litter of seven, which Bowers named Ban, Brian, Deirdre, Graysteel, Juno, Morhault, and Shaun, each one with the suffix "of the Fen" attached ("Ban of the Fen," etc.). Early in 1935 he bred Top Lady to his own Sulhamstead Gala, and a litter of five resulted on 12 March 1935—named Cabal, Dark Rosaleen, Degare, Hodain, and Yseult (again, "of the Fen"). To announce the availability of these puppies, he took a full-page advertisement in the 1934-35 volume of Annual Reports of the Irish Wolfhound Club of America (IWCA), headed "The Irish Wolfhounds of the Fen," showing a picture of Kiora and noting that Bedlington terrier puppies were "occasionally available." Meanwhile he had shown Gala extensively (and Kiora somewhat less so), beginning with the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) Kennel Club show on 2 September 1933. By mid-1934 Gala had been shown sixteen times in seven states and on 20 July 1934 earned the last of the requisite points to become a champion of American Kennel Club record (the thirty-fifth Irish wolfhound to achieve this status). Although Bowers showed Gala several more times, he began to be asked to judge Irish wolfhounds and in 1935 appeared at two shows as judge rather than exhibitor—the beginning of what was to be a long association with dog-show judging.

Bowers became well known in dog circles not only because he possessed a champion but also because he wrote about dogs with some frequency.

Besides his article on training dogs for the street, he published a piece entitled "Novices All Need the Sympathetic Judging of Their Dogs" (American Kennel Gazette, April 1935)—full of eminently sensible advice that suggests how thoughtfully Bowers approached his own duties as a judge. When he returned from his summer in England in 1935, he wrote for the Annual Reports of the IWCA a fascinating account of the various kennels he had visited abroad (he was also a member of the Irish Wolfhound Club in England) and the shows he had attended there ("English Notes and Comments"). His love of dogs showed through clearly in everything he wrote about them, as in this concluding sentence of that essay: In addition to submitting articles to the American Kennel Gazette, he was assiduous in sending accounts of his activities to L. O. Starbuck, who conducted the column on Irish wolfhounds, and several of his letters were quoted there. The August 1935 column consisted entirely of Bowers's description of the Irish Wolfhound Association of New England, which he had been instrumental in forming the previous November; he wrote the June 1936 column on the subject of coursing; and in the September 1936 column Starbuck quoted Bowers's description and analysis of the stuffed specimens he had seen the previous summer in London at the Museum of Natural History. In that same column Starbuck said, "I have to credit Fredson Bowers with the most marked loyalty to the breed in helping to furnish something of interest from time to time."

His principal writing on dogs while still at Harvard was a book-length general introduction to all breeds, which he dedicated to his dog-world mentor Frank Eskrigge and which Houghton Mifflin published as The Dog Owner's Handbook in October 1936 (just after he had begun teaching at Princeton). The front of the dust jacket was labeled "A Guaranteed Dog Book," and the flap explained, "Any purchaser who is not satisfied with it may return the book within five days for refund." In the preface he stated his qualifications for producing a work "squarely intended for the average pet dog owner or the person thinking of buying a dog":

This combination of "theory" with "practical experience" was to be a hallmark of his writing from then on: he was not temperamentally attracted to theory for its own sake, as he often pointed out, and his works are filled with illustrative examples drawn from his own experience. He vowed in this preface to eschew "windy generalities" and to speak frankly about the merits and demerits of individual breeds, risking "the charge of personal prejudice" in order "to be of as great help as possible" through his own "experience with several breeds, a fairly intimate acquaintance with many, and observation of the rest." In a straightforward, serviceable style (addressing the reader in the second person), he covered all the expected topics, from selecting dogs to training and showing them; the heart of the book was a long chapter on "The Dogs Themselves," describing the history, uses, and characteristics of forty-two breeds and offering advice about each. Bowers's partiality for the Irish wolfhound came through in his account of it as a "thoroughly satisfactory dog in every way. No owner ever changes to any other large breed" (p. 69). Another similar—and similarly titled—book (but more technical and more suited for the kennel owner), Josephine Z. Rine's The Dog Owner's Manual, was brought out by Coward-McCann at almost precisely the same time. Frank Dole reviewed both books (and five other more specialized ones) in the book section of the New York Herald Tribune on 20 December 1936, praising them both but treating Bowers's first and calling it one of the better of the Christmas books "for the person not very well acquainted with the field." He found Bowers's book "capably done" and "written so that the reader incurs a natural desire to learn more of the intricacies of dogdom." The book had some success, for it was reprinted by the Sun Dial Press in 1940 and was still mentioned in the 1950s in some of the lists of recommended books that appeared in the American Kennel Club's magazine.

During 1935 Bowers sold many of his puppies, and in March of 1936, following his divorce and in anticipation of his move to Princeton, he sold his remaining hounds. (Both Sulhamstead Kiora and Top Lady of Ambleside became champions later that year.) Bowers's oldest son recently

recalled, "When the dogs and puppies were sold, I more or less inherited the dog house, and a dozen or so of us neighborhood children used it as a clubhouse"—the structure being "eight or nine feet long" and "six feet wide and six feet high," with "two levels, a door and window high up at each end for ventilation." From time to time after that, Bowers considered owning some hounds once more: Alma J. Starbuck (L. O. Starbuck's widow) said, in her November 1947 report on the Specialty Show held two months earlier, "It was good to see Fredson Bowers again, looking quite the same and letting us know it's just a question of a little time before he will again have a Wolfhound on the lead." But he never did; from 1936 on, his activities in the dog world were limited to writing and judging, though he did a considerable amount of both. After writing two more columns for the American Kennel Gazette (in January 1937 a thoughtful piece on the relative popularity of Irish wolfhounds among American dog owners, and in July an account of the latest Morris and Essex Kennel Club show, the first major show that he had judged), Bowers was chosen by Alma Starbuck as her successor to handle this column. In the December 1937 number Bowers wrote: After asking for contributions, he warned his readers, "My main business is mounting the lecture platform, and if you all don't combine to keep me off it here, on your own heads be it"; and he then reported on the Richmond show that he had attended on his visit to England in the summer of 1937, recognizing that the English level "is still way and above ours." For the next three years, through the December 1940 column (when Bowers wrote, "And, Santa Claus, give us a new columnist"), Bowers conducted the column vigorously, missing only September and October of 1938 (because of his move to Virginia), July through October 1939 (because of a trip to England), and July 1940.

These thirty columns, totaling about 30,000 words, covered such topics as current shows (e.g., January and April 1938 and March 1940, the latter dealing with a show he judged), the formation of a Mid-Atlantic Irish Wolfhound Association (July 1938), coursing (August

1938), Irish wolfhound history (June 1939, a column that links Bowers's literary and canine interests with its report of a previously unnoticed reference to the breed in Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master of 1672), the hardiness of the breed (November 1939 and January 1940), and the economics of wolfhound-raising (December 1939, where Bowers says that the hound "still remains the best of all the large breeds, but he simply has not been sold to the public as the Great Dane has been"). (Bowers also treated the history of Irish wolfhounds in a major article in the May 1939 number.) The subject that came up most often, however, in about a dozen of the columns, was the possible revision of the official standard of excellence for Irish wolfhounds. Bowers's view (February 1938) was that, although the sixty-year-old standard was out of date, it should probably be retained "as an historical document" and should be provided with "a series of supplementary notes which can be printed with the standard as a fuller and more complete guide to the ideal of the Irish wolfhound." That Bowers should have involved himself actively in this matter is not surprising, for his mind was attracted to categorization and systematization, and the problem was not unlike the bibliographical question he later addressed concerning the description of "ideal" copies of books, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of actual surviving copies. In one of his most thoughtful columns on the wolfhound standard (January 1939), he wrote that "it is of the utmost importance that a clear and reasonably definite set of rules be laid down for judging any breed if the great benefit which dog shows confer upon improving the breed is not to turn into a boomerang by reason of such diverse judging that no practical ideal can be ascertained." He continued his analysis of points not adequately covered in the old standard through three more columns in the spring of 1939 (March, April, May); a year later (April 1940) he was glad to report that a committee had been formed to look into this question ("a project very close to my heart"), and he made additional comments throughout that year, especially on the need for cooperation (May) and the treatment of the size of wolfhounds (September, October). Even after he gave up his column, he still pursued the subject: in the volume of Annual Reports of the IWCA for 1939-40 (published 1941), he included in his list of desiderata for the Club the impatient statement, "it is time that we took some definite action or decided definitely to take no action"; and after the war, when new standards of weight and height were adopted, he wrote some "Random Notes on the Standard" (Annual Reports, 1946-47), in which he made further specific suggestions for revision and advocated that an interpretive section be added.

From then on, the only writings on dogs that Bowers published were the occasional accounts of shows that he judged. Although he was not a particularly active judge, his judging career spanned a thirty-year period, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s (he was one of the first six judges approved by the IWCA, and he was included in the official lists of American Kennel Club licensed judges from 1936 through 1973—qualified to judge borzois, Great Pyrenees, and Scottish deerhounds, as well as Irish wolfhounds). Among the shows he judged were the Greenwich in 1936 and 1938 (the presence of Raymond Whitney's Silver making the latter "a sentimental occasion," he said in his August 1938 column, "as I afterwards found he is a son of my now deceased Ch. Sulhamstead Gala"), the Morris and Essex and the Philadelphia in 1937, the Westminster in 1940, the IWCA Specialty in 1948 and 1954, and the Long Island in 1964 and 1966. In the 1940s his influence was also felt through his service on the Governing Committee of the IWCA.

Even though the period of Bowers's intense activity in the dog world was relatively brief, he made a lasting place for himself in the annals of Irish wolfhounds through the calibre of the hounds he owned and bred, the attention his writings and opinions received, and the length of his career as a judge. Alma J. Starbuck, in The Complete Irish Wolfhound (1963), devoted a paragraph to Bowers in her historical section:

When in 1976 the IWCA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a special number of its journal, Harp & Hound, five pages of excerpts from Bowers's writings were included—an honor accorded to no one else. Besides several other scattered quotations from him and a picture of him at the 1954 Specialty Show, this number contained, in its account of "The First Decade" by Mrs. Kelly Fox, an informative assessment of his contribution: Bowers's position at the center of controversy in the dog world of the 1930s and 1940s, as described here, foreshadowed his position in the world of textual scholarship in the 1960s and later. Most of the scholars who debated textual issues with him, however, had no idea that he had also played an authoritative role in a very different field.

Bowers moved into 50 University Place, Princeton, in the summer of 1936. In his two years at Princeton, his course load consisted of two classes of freshman English (actually literature), three sophomore preceptorials, and a section of English A, the noncredit remedial course. Despite this heavy schedule, and his dog columns and dog-show judging, he accomplished a considerable amount of research, notably some of the early stages of the work leading toward his edition of Dekker. (In the first volume of that edition, when published in 1953, he thanked the Princeton University Library staff for acquiring microfilms of copies of early Dekker editions for his use.) One sign of his concentration on Dekker at this time was a journalistic piece on The Shoemaker's Holiday that he wrote for the Sunday arts section of the New York Times (26 December 1937), as well as three scholarly articles on Dekker. (In the Times piece, he asserted that "Dekker is among the select few [of Shakespeare's contemporaries] who can boldly face the glare of modern foot-lights.") Altogether nearly a dozen (mostly short) scholarly articles of his appeared in print during the two Princeton years (eight in 1937 alone), though many of them had of course been written at Harvard. (Legend has it that Bowers filled his Princeton colleagues' mailboxes with more offprints than they perhaps desired.) These articles came out in major journals, like Journal of English and Germanic Philology and

Studies in Philology, and dealt largely with revenge tragedy (and duelling), Gascoigne, and Thomas Randolph (to whom Bowers attributed The Fary Knight, the manuscript of which he had examined in the Folger Library, decided to edit, and described in a paper called "A Long Lost Elizabethan Play" at the Modern Language Association convention on 29 December 1936). Most of these pieces illustrate what he said of his early writings in a 1957 account of his career (written to accompany grant applications): "Before the late 1930's . . . I was chiefly interested in the sociological background of Renaissance English Drama and in the artistic forms of its tragedy."

The most important of his articles at this time, in terms of his future career, was "Bibliographical Problems in Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment," his first truly bibliographical article and his first appearance in The Library, the journal of the Bibliographical Society in London. The date of the number in which it was published, December 1936, shows that it had been written while he was still at Harvard, and it provides the best evidence that his mind had begun turning toward analytical bibliography at that time. In his 1957 autobiographical statement, he recalled that "in the late 1930's, coincidental with my starting on post-doctoral research leading to an edition of the Plays of Thomas Dekker, my work in large part switched towards discovering new techniques in analytical (critical) bibliography to apply to problems of textual criticism." Clearly one of his projects as a Dexter Scholar in England in the summer of 1935 was the examination of multiple copies of The Magnificent Entertainment, for he reported having collated the copies in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Whether he saw W. W. Greg on that trip or simply corresponded with him is not clear, but his first footnote began, "Dr. W. W. Greg has pointed out to me. . . ." The article (seven short pages) recorded the places where the two 1604 London editions show the same setting of type and conjectured that, in order to speed the production of the second edition, the type that remained standing had been transferred from the shop of Thomas Creede (the printer named on the title page of the first edition) to that of Edward Allde (the printer named on the title page of the second).

This reasoning is unconvincing, as Greg was quick to point out. The next number of The Library (March 1937) printed his three-page letter to the editor showing that "Mr. Bowers's analysis of the bibliographical problems involved in the two London editions can be carried somewhat further and the results presented in somewhat simpler and more significant

form." The key point that Bowers had missed was stated by Greg at the outset: "it is clear that neither edition was the work of a single press." On the basis of an examination of the types in the headlines, Greg could divide the first edition into the work of five printers and the second edition into the work of four of those five. He also explained why the evidence supports the view—contrary to Bowers—"that the sheets were printed in the houses where the type was set, and that it was the printed sheets and not the formes of type that were collected in one office." With his usual severity—but with good reason—Greg called Bowers's arguments for the transfer of the type "wholly irrelevant." And he was right to question this extraordinarily careless sentence of Bowers's: "With sig. C1, which is reprinted page for page but not wholly line for line, the text of the two editions is finally joined signature for signature" (to which Greg responded, "I am not at all sure that I know what this means"). Greg's letter was simpler, clearer, and more plausible than Bowers's article, and its masterly handling of bibliographical evidence was unquestionably seen by Bowers as an object lesson (despite the fact that he thought Greg had not been entirely fair in dealing with the situation). Bowers's inauspicious debut as a bibliographical writer was, given his temperament, a stimulus to learn more: from the point of view of bibliographical history, Greg's criticism was the most significant event of Bowers's two years at Princeton.

In his second year at Princeton, Bowers was offered a position for the following fall as Acting Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia by James Southall Wilson (Dean of the Department of Graduate Studies), who apparently had in mind that Bowers might succeed John Calvin Metcalf, then in his early seventies (and scheduled to retire in 1940). Bowers accepted the offer and in the summer of 1938 moved to Charlottesville, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Bowers had liked Wilson immediately; they became close friends and had many occasions to work together until Wilson's retirement in 1951 (at the age of seventy). One mark of Bowers's fondness and respect for Wilson was his assuming the editorship of a festschrift for Wilson in 1951; another was his preparing the official memorial resolution when Wilson died in 1963. At that time (28 June 1963) he wrote Wilson's widow, "I have always loved and revered him. He was the cause of my coming to the University, and he was an important reason why I stayed, perhaps the most important reason. I have always said that he was one of the three or four authentically great men whom I have known in my

lifetime." (In 1969 Bowers was one of the people who caused the new English department building to be named "Wilson Hall," and at the dedication ceremony Bowers was visibly moved.)

Bowers's first address in Charlottesville was 27 University Circle, and after a year he moved to Fontaine Avenue—both locations near the university. In addition to freshman English, the first courses he taught were the undergraduate survey of the seventeenth century and the graduate course in the eighteenth-century novel. During his second year (after the summer of 1939 in France and England), he arranged to have a course in bibliography announced for the succeeding year, and the university bulletin for 1940-41 duly listed him as the teacher of an advanced graduate-level course entitled "Introduction to Bibliographical Research," with the following description, undoubtedly written by Bowers himself:

In the next year, when "Acting" had been dropped from his title, he offered this course again, but the bulletin announced that henceforth he would teach it in alternate years, with an advanced course on pre-1642 non-Shakespearean drama in between ("either course," it added, "will be offered in the off-year at the request of five or more students"). The drama course had formerly been taught by Metcalf (though Bowers modified its description by including as one topic the "transmission of dramatic texts"), and Bowers was now officially assigned to three more of Metcalf's graduate courses—on Spenser and Milton, on Elizabethan poetry and prose, and on seventeenth-century literature. He also was listed for a new introductory research methods course, in which one element was "Study of the history of the printed book from the incunabula period to the present day, with some consideration of principles of textual criticism." Within his first four years at Virginia, therefore, he taught, or was scheduled to teach, most of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courses, excluding Shakespeare, and had the opportunity to discuss textual criticism in them, as well as in two methodological courses of his own creation.

During these same years several significant scholarly publications of his appeared. The most substantial was the revised version of his dissertation,

published by Princeton University Press in 1940 as Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642. The 300-page book was appropriately dedicated to his dissertation adviser, Kittredge, whom Bowers further acknowledged in his preface (dated 20 January 1940) for "the searching criticism and the numerous suggestions which he lavished on the earliest version of this work." Bowers also thanked Rollins and two former Princeton colleagues, Hoyt Hudson and Thomas Parrott, among others, for having "read and criticized" the manuscript "in various stages," and he noted that his former wife ("Mrs. Sutphen Bowers") had "typed several early drafts." The book followed the same general plan as the dissertation, but with all the discussions considerably condensed; as before, the examination of individual plays was the heart of the study, and the book managed to consider all but eight or nine of the sixty-five plays discussed in the dissertation. Bowers's treatment began with the code of blood-revenge and the influence of Seneca; he then examined the Hamlet story and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and detailed their progeny in four periods (the focus moving from moral hero to villain to propaganda and back to revenge, but now without an ethical dimension); and he ended with the decline of the tradition in the "empty ingenuity and worn-out tragic conventions which had lost all touch with the problems of human life and ethics, and all interest in the human soul." (These closing words of the book are practically the same as those of his dissertation and of its published summary in 1935.)

Although the categorization underlying the structure of the book was criticized by M. C. Bradbrook in an unfavorable assessment in Review of English Studies (1941), and although Una Ellis-Fermor (in Modern Language Review, 1941) felt that Bowers had neglected English scholarship, the book was greeted with enthusiasm by a number of reviewers. Willard Farnham, for instance, commenting in Modern Language Quarterly (1940), felt that such a book "was waiting to be written"; and Hazelton Spencer called it "a better outline of the subject and a better description of its principal features than has hitherto been available" (Modern Language Notes, 1940). One part of Spencer's praise probably gave Bowers particular pleasure: the book, Spencer said, besides being necessary for "every specialist," is one that general readers interested in Shakespeare "should find rewarding and much less difficult than academic monographs are popularly supposed to be." It has indeed continued to have an audience: the Peter Smith firm reprinted it in 1959, and Princeton brought it out in paperback in 1966, at which time John Lawlor called it "a classic contribution to the study of Elizabethan drama" (Critical Quarterly, 1968). More recently George

L. Geckle said that the book "has done as much as any single work of dramatic criticism in this century to establish the 'great tragic theme' of those earlier centuries." For the 1959 reprint Bowers had a note (dated September 1958) printed in the lower margin of page 9, issuing a "warning" to the reader that his discussion had been written before "the derived nature of the First Quarto Hamlet text" was established; for the Princeton paperback (which went through several printings), he appended to the preface a postscript (dated November 1965) noting that he had made minor changes on five pages (those on pages 85-86 handled the Hamlet matter) and declaring that he could not "disown" the book, "however much one may wish to treat one's early ventures in publication as by-blows."

A second notable publication of these years was the edition of The Fary Knight, a previously unpublished play attributed to Thomas Randolph, that Bowers published in 1942 as the second monograph in the series of "University of Virginia Studies." He had begun work on the edition while still at Princeton, for his letter in the Times Literary Supplement on 17 April 1937 stated that he was "engaged on a critical edition of this play," and he had published five articles on Randolph since then. In working on Randolph, Bowers was following in Rollins's foot-steps (Rollins had edited Randolph's The Drinking Academy in 1930, while Bowers was at Harvard), and Bowers dedicated his edition to Rollins. (He also acknowledged the help of Kittredge and Greg, among many others.) The text of the Folger manuscript, as he described it, was a revised version (revised by someone other than Randolph) of what "probably represents Randolph's earliest known attempt at the dramatic form"; and in endnotes he provided numerous parallel passages from other works of Randolph and other writers. Although he had described his project in 1937 as a "critical edition," the text as it was completed four years later (the preface is dated May 1941) was "a word-for-word and line-for-line transcript," with "necessary corrections" placed in footnotes, along with a record of the revisions on the manuscript.

This edition, the first in what would eventually be a long series of editions from Bowers, was uncharacteristic of his later work in presenting a diplomatic reprint as its main text, rather than a critical text incorporating his own emendations. But it did adumbrate his later concerns in its attention to the description of manuscript alterations: the footnotes recording cancellations and interlineations display the earliest stage in an evolving system for dealing with the problem. J. B. Leishman, who reviewed the edition unfavorably in Review of English Studies (1944), regarded the attribution to Randolph as "both improbable and

unnecessary" and found the play itself to be of "no literary value" and to hold "little interest of any kind"; the diplomatic transcription, he believed, was carried out with "unnecessary scrupulosity." Alfred Harbage (in Modern Language Notes, 1944) was less severe, but he also was not entirely convinced by the attribution; he was willing to believe, however, that Bowers's "earnest conviction doggedly presented" did establish a "possibility," and he found the editing "meticulously" carried out.

Among Bowers's nine other contributions to scholarly periodicals during these years (besides those on Randolph), two are particularly important for the history of bibliography: his article in The Library of December 1938 on running-titles as bibliographical evidence and his paper on headlines (of which running-titles are a part) read before the English Institute at Columbia University on 9 September 1941. The former was his first major contribution to the methodology of analyzing the physical evidence in books, and the two together, along with a paper by his student Charlton Hinman (also delivered at the 1941 English Institute), established the examination of running-titles as a tool of bibliographical analysis. Running-titles had to be set in type several times in order to be placed at the heads of the several type-pages that would be on the press simultaneously, and sometimes several more were set for use with the type to be printed on the other side of the sheet; but once set, these running-titles were normally reused throughout the printing of a book, and patterns in the recurrence of individual running-titles can reveal facts about the printing process, as Bowers showed. Although the reuse of running-titles had been noticed by A. W. Pollard by at least 1909 (in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos) and had been referred to by several other bibliographers in the intervening years (as Bowers noted), there had been no extensive treatment of its value as bibliographical evidence before Bowers's. Headline analysis has since become one of the basic techniques of bibliographical investigation.

The background of that 1938 article offers some insight into Bowers's bibliographical education—and, indeed, into the passion of his later advocacy of bibliographical research. What happened was that, while still at Princeton, he had published a second brief piece in The Library ("Thomas Dekker: Two Textual Notes," in the December 1937 number), concluding that the Dyce copy of Dekker's The Roaring Girle (1611) contained the later state of the inner forme of sheet I. His conclusion was based on what seemed to be "corrected" readings in the Dyce copy; but it was shown to be faulty by James G. McManaway of the Folger Library in the September 1938 number of The Library, which appeared shortly after Bowers's arrival in Charlottesville. Using running-title

evidence, McManaway demonstrated that, contrary to what the textual evidence seemed to suggest, sheet I in the Dyce copy was in the earlier state. McManaway, six years older than Bowers, was clearly the mentor here, as his first footnote suggested: Bowers learned his lesson and, in his 1941 paper on headlines, said that he still remembered "with considerable ruefulness" his earlier treatment of The Roaring Girle: When Bowers collected this piece in his 1975 Essays, he added a further recollection: "it was this salutary correction of my error (which had been printed) coming on top of W. W. Greg's correction of another bibliographical mistake I had made about Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment that first suggested to me I had better learn something about bibliography if I were going to edit Elizabethan plays" (pp. 205-206). (McManaway's article relayed an additional criticism from Greg—that "Mr. Bowers was ill advised to offer as bibliographical evidence" the long dash on 4 in the Dyce copy, since long dashes and rows of hyphens were used indiscriminately throughout.)

The lasting impression that these corrections made on Bowers is suggested by his commenting on the matter another time in his collected volume: he added a new footnote to the opening essay, referring to the correction of an error he made using "pseudo-critical evidence" in his "first fumbling approach to the text of Thomas Dekker" and concluding, "This and another salutary shock of the same nature assisted me to become a bibliographer" (p. 8). It seems fitting, in the light of Bowers's subsequent major achievement in editing Dekker, that his serious entry into the bibliographical world was occasioned by his earliest publications on Dekker; and it was characteristic of him, feeling rebuked for overlooking bibliographical evidence in his first two appearances in the premier bibliographical journal, to proceed promptly to make himself into an authority on the subject. He did not hesitate to use these two episodes as an example of how easily one can be misled by neglecting physical evidence; and this personal experience no doubt underlay the strength of his drive to promote a broader awareness of analytical bibliography.

Another early instance of such promotion, besides the two articles on headlines, occurred in a 1942 omnibus review of eight books for Modern Language Notes. In the course of discussing Clare Howard's edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies, Bowers wrote,

This passage, significant for its date, shows Bowers's early perception of neglected bibliographical issues; the problem of the variant forme in a facsimile edition was a subject that he and Charlton Hinman were to confront in detail later on. The early 1940s may have seemed to him at the time as "these bibliographical days"; but after the war the days would become much more bibliographical, in no small part because of his own activities.

In these early years in Charlottesville, Bowers became acquainted with Nancy Hale, another New Englander transplanted to Virginia.

She was a member of an illustrious family: Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary patriot, was the great-uncle of her grandfather (she later said—in New England Discovery [1963]—that as she grew up the American Revolution seemed "almost a family affair"); Harriet Beecher Stowe was her great-great-aunt; Edward Everett, president of Harvard, was her great-great-uncle; Lucretia Peabody Hale, author of The Peterkin Papers, was her great-aunt; Edward Everett Hale, prominent minister and author of "The Man without a Country," was her grandfather; and her parents, Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale, were both well-known painters (her mother was a particularly successful portrait painter; her father, whose work was included in the 1913 Armory Show, also wrote art criticism and taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts). By the time Bowers met her, Nancy Hale (who was three years younger than Bowers, having been born on 6 May 1908) had already published two novels and a collection of short stories, and she was trying to finish a long third novel while raising two sons and dealing with the deterioration of her second marriage, a situation that led to a breakdown and a period of Jungian analysis. (Both her marriages had been to Virginians, first to Taylor Hardin in 1928 and then to the novelist Charles Wertenbaker in 1937, though her years with Hardin were spent in New York, where she worked for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Times—her few months on the Times in 1935 making her only the fourth woman in fifty years to be hired as a city-room reporter there.) She and Bowers had more in common than their New England background and the brevity of their residence in Charlottesville: both had experienced marital difficulties recently, and both were passionately dedicated to their writing. They were married on 16 March 1942 (by Bowers's landlord, a minister), and the marriage proved to be a perfect, and lifetime, match. They respected one another's work, and their relationship provided the kind of mutual support that enabled them both to be productive.

The year 1942 was eventful for both of them, and not only because of their marriage. Her ambitious novel so long in process, The Prodigal Women, was published to great acclaim and became a best-seller; and he entered into military duty. Before Pearl Harbor, Bowers had been given secret instruction as a cryptanalyst in a naval communications intelligence group being formed at the university, and he was now asked to supervise an intelligence unit working on deciphering enemy codes. As a Lieutenant (junior grade) in the United States Naval Reserve, he moved to Washington (a hundred twenty miles away)—to 3727 McKinley Street, N.W.—with his new family that included Nancy Hale's two sons, Mark Hardin (born 1930) and William Wertenbaker (born 1938).

(During their Washington years she wrote promotional pieces for the Treasury Department.) Bowers threw himself into the work with characteristic enthusiasm and energy, and he was eventually promoted to Lieutenant Commander. One story of his wartime activity has been well recounted by E. D. Hirsch (in his memorial resolution for Bowers at the University of Virginia faculty meeting on 23 April 1991): A concern with sleep was understandable, since the work was scheduled on a twenty-four-hour watch system, in which the time of each individual's eight-hour shift changed every three days. For Bowers the excitement of the search made up for the disruptive effects of this plan; and after the war he would describe the exhilaration that came when the solution of a code with scrambled five-digit sets finally fell into place and he realized that he had learned the location of a Japanese warship.

The group assembled in the Naval Communications Annex at Ward Circle was remarkable—a "dismayingly bright bunch," in the words of William H. Bond (who said that in odd moments they would engage in such activities as "playing blindfold chess"). The unit included Archibald Hill and William Weedon from the University of Virginia (English and philosophy), Richmond Lattimore (the classicist from Bryn Mawr), Samuel Thorne (the legal historian, then at Northwestern), Walter Rideout (then a teaching assistant at Harvard), and Stephen Parrish (who had just graduated from the University of Illinois), among others. But from the point of view of bibliographical history, the most important fact is that the group also included Giles Dawson and Ray O. Hummel of the Folger Library staff, and William H. Bond and Charlton Hinman, who had been Folger Research Fellows together in 1941-42. Bond, later to head the Houghton Library, was then a student of Rollins's at Harvard; he had become interested in bibliographical analysis while at the Folger and had written a pioneering article on half-sheet imposition (published in the September-December 1941 number of The Library). Hinman had been Bowers's first dissertation student (earning

a Ph.D. in 1941) and had "with great originality pushed ahead" in developing techniques for analytical bibliography (to use Bowers's words at the 1941 English Institute). The method followed in the intelligence unit for comparing successive photographs of enemy fortifications, to see whether changes had been made, gave Hinman the idea for a machine to facilitate collating the texts of copies of books from the same typesetting—a machine put together, as Bond described it, "from bits taken from Giles Dawson's son's Erector set, two slide projectors, and sundry electric motors, mirrors, etc." After the war, he developed into a more sophisticated form what came to be known as the Hinman Collator and used it to compare copies of the Shakespeare First Folio at the Folger Library.

It seems appropriate that several of the scholars interested in analytical bibliography after the war, including the two leaders of the field (Bowers and Hinman), spent their wartime years performing cryptanalytic work together, for the goal of both activities is to find meaningful patterns in what at first seem to be chaotic data, and the bent of mind required for both is obviously similar. (Indeed, in a letter of 22 October 1985, Bowers referred to "breaking the code of the two different systems of compositor marking" in two of Hawthorne's books.) Bowers's wartime training doubtless gave stimulus to his postwar bibliographical research, and it certainly showed him the excitement that can reward the indefatigable analysis of details. When the war was over, in 1945, to returned to Charlottesville and began the steady building of what was to become one of the most distinguished and influential careers in the history of American scholarship.