Harry Vincent Wann

Born in Warsaw, Indiana, on September 3, 1887, Harry Vincent Wann was an American educator and author best known for French Conversation and Composition. Contemporary title pages identify him as a professor of Romance Languages at Indiana State Normal School.

In the preface to French Conversation and Composition, Wann explains that the book grew out of five years of work with conversation classes at the University of Michigan. That background helps explain the book’s practical tone: it was designed not just to teach rules, but to give students material they could actually use in speaking and writing French.

Wann also wrote The Tradition of the Homeric Simile in Eighteenth Century French Poetry, showing a more scholarly side alongside his teaching work. He died in 1970.