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Kemp Malone, 1889–1971

Kemp Malone (March 14, 1889 – October 13, 1971) was an American medievalist, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Chaucer. He was a lecturer and then professor of English literature at Johns Hopkins University from 1924 to 1956.<ref>Bibliothèque nationale de France {BnF Data}. "Kemp Malone (1889-1971)".</ref>

Life and careerEdit

Born in Minter City, Mississippi, to an academic family, Kemp Malone graduated from Emory College (as it then was) in 1907, with the ambition of mastering all the languages that impinged upon the development of Middle English. He spent several years in Germany, Denmark and Iceland. When World War I broke out, he served two years in the United States Army and was discharged with the rank of captain.

Malone was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1945.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He served as president of the Modern Language Association, and other philological associations<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and was etymology editor of the American College Dictionary, 1947. With Louise Pound and Arthur G. Kennedy, he founded the journal American Speech, "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He resisted the views of Old English poetry as products of a purely oral tradition. He contended that we must look to poets' individual elaboration of traditional structures: "A given poet was reckoned worthy if he handled with skill the stuff of which, by convention, poems must be made".<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

His interests ranged from 10th-century manuscripts to the etymology of contemporary comic strip names. American speech, the English language, the historical Arthur (his suggestion was the Roman dux Lucius Artorius Castus),<ref>Christopher Snyder: Arthurian Origins. In: Norris J. Lacy (ed.): A History of Arthurian Scholarship. Boydell & Brewer, 2006, Template:ISBN, pp. 1-19, in particular p. 3</ref> Cædmon and Beowulf (he edited a facsimile of the Thorkelin transcripts, 1951), Deor – all were subjects among his hundreds of publications. He edited and translated a large corpus of medieval poetry, including Widsith from the Exeter Book (1936). A sample of his production is a 1941 published book about old English poems, that were transferred into modern English alliterative verse.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

Rare books from his library, donated 1971 to Emory University, are part of the Ancient and Medieval History (MARBL) collection, held at Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University Libraries. The Kemp Malone library content were fully registered under Call number Z997.M35.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

His literary heritage (30 document boxes) were deposited in 1983 at Johns Hopkins University.<ref>Template:CitationTemplate:Dead link</ref>

The historian and biographer Dumas Malone was his younger brother.

ReferencesEdit

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Further readingEdit

  • Norman E. Eliason: "Kemp Malone: 14 March 1889 – 13 October 1971". American Speech, volume 44, no. 3 (fall 1969), pp. 163–165 (JSTOR)
  • Richard Macksey: "Obituary: Kemp Malone: 1889–1971". MLN, volume 6, no. 6, Comparative Literature (Dec. 1971), p. 760 (JSTOR)
  • Thomas Pyles: "Kemp Malone". Language, volume 48, no. 2 (June 1972), pp. 499–505 (JSTOR)
  • R. W. Zandvoort: "In Memoriam Kemp Malone". English Studies 53 (1972), pp. 87–88
  • Albert C. Baugh, Morton W. Bloomfield, Francis P. Magoun: "Kemp Malone". Speculum 47 (1972), pp. 601–03

External linksEdit

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