author
John Matthews Manly
1865–1940
A gifted American scholar of Shakespeare and Chaucer, he spent much of his career at the University of Chicago and became known for exacting, ambitious literary research. His work on The Canterbury Tales, completed with Edith Rickert, helped set a new standard for modern textual scholarship.
1 Audiobook
Contemporary American Literature Bibliographies and Study Outlines
by John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert
About the author
Born in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1865, he showed unusual academic promise early and earned a master's degree from Furman University while still very young. He later studied at Harvard and went on to become a professor of English literature and philology at the University of Chicago, where he built a reputation as a demanding and deeply learned scholar.
His research centered on major medieval and early modern writers, especially Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. He is best remembered for the large-scale Chaucer project he led with his former student Edith Rickert, which culminated in the eight-volume The Text of the Canterbury Tales in 1940, the year he died.
Manly's career also reached beyond the classroom. During World War I, he served in U.S. military intelligence and took part in cryptographic work, adding an unexpected chapter to the life of a literary scholar. He died in 1940, leaving behind a body of work shaped by patience, rigor, and a taste for difficult problems.