Professor of English Literature
Centurion, 1903–1932
Born 18 February 1863 in Boston, Massachusetts
Died 19 August 1932 in Schenectady, New York
Buried Vale Cemetery
, Schenectady, New York
Proposed by Percy Stickney Grant and Hamilton W. Mabie
Elected 7 March 1903 at age forty
Archivist’s Note: Uncle of Herbert Dudley Hale and Robert Beverly Hale
Century Memorial
Edward Everett Hale inherited a name so well-known in American letters as in a way to obscure his own achievements in the collegiate chair of English. His father’s “Man without a Country”—that purely imaginative story of an American officer who had cursed his government in a moment of ill-humor, had thereupon been deprived of American citizenship, and had spent the rest of his roving life in sorrowful remorse—was told in so frank and matter-of-fact a manner, was so convincingly supported by allusion to casual incident, as actually to have elicited petitions to our government for the unhappy alien’s restoration as a citizen. A literary achievement of that sort, for which perhaps no parallel exists outside of Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, set a hard pattern for the second generation, and the Dr. Hale of our later times did not undertake to match it. He was a quiet and gentle instructor, personally loved by his classes at Cornell and Union. What he published was chiefly criticism or text-books.
Alexander Dana Noyes
1933 Century Association Yearbook
