John Louis Haney

Born in 1877, John Louis Haney was an American teacher, scholar, and book collector whose career was closely tied to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania sources say he earned his undergraduate degree in 1898, his doctorate in 1901, and later an honorary LL.D. in 1939.

Haney spent years on Penn’s English faculty and also served at Central High School in Philadelphia, where he became president of the school. He was known not only as an educator but also as a serious student of literature, and Penn notes that he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1929.

His books show the range of his interests: he wrote on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Shakespeare, edited Early Reviews of English Poets, and published broader works such as English Literature. Archival records also describe him as a lifelong diarist, and they preserve drafts of an autobiography titled Days of My Years, suggesting a writer who was as interested in recording a life as in interpreting books.