Professor of English
Centurion, 1918–1966
Born 4 April 1871 in Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died 21 July 1966 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Buried Mount Auburn Cemetery
, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Proposed by James E. Frame and William Tenney Brewster
Elected 1 June 1918 at age forty-seven
Century Memorial
Known to a reading public as “F.N.” and to his friends as “Fritz,” this greatly loved ornament to Harvard’s English department surprised many a young man out of his awe at the immense erudition and scholarly mien of the professor by a truly Chaucerian wit. A Centurion who studied under him writes, “I had him in Chaucer in my sophomore year at Harvard and have never heard anyone who could bring such life and lilt to the Canterbury Tales.” Another remembers, “He gave a ferociously erudite course on English philology which all candidates for the Ph.D. were supposed to take—but year after year he assured his class that they need simply listen to his lectures and get what they could out of them without taking any examinations. The result was that most of us learned more than we ever could have, had we been haunted by the fear of meeting a formal test.”
Fritz’s hobby was dancing. Often he gave little dinners for students and their wives and some of his young relatives. After a good dinner at a restaurant—he was a connoisseur of both food and wine—he would keep them on the dance floor for hours. He kept this up till he was nearly ninety.
As a professor he had much to live up to, for he succeeded the celebrated George Lyman (“Kitty”) Kittredge as Gurney Professor of English Literature. He was a leading authority on Chaucer and Celtic philology. He edited the Cambridge Edition of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, published in 1934.
Fred Norris Robinson was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1871 and took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard College at the age of twenty. A year later he took his master’s at Harvard University and, in 1894, his Ph.D. After a time as instructor and assistant professor at Harvard, he became full professor in 1906 and succeeded Kittredge thirty years later. He was at one time president of the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of many learned societies and academies in the United States and abroad.
He was a member of The Century for forty-eight of his ninety-five years.
Roger Burlingame
1967 Century Association Yearbook