Livingston, Arthur, 1883-1944

American professor of Romance languages, publisher, and translator.

This collection is in two parts, the first of which is housed in the Dept. of Special Collections, and the second in the Avery Architectural Library.

Arthur Livingston, professor of Romance languages and literatures, publisher, and translator, was born on September 30, 1883, in Northbridge, Massachusetts. Livingston earned the A. B. degree at Amherst College in 1904, continuing his work in Romance languages at Columbia University, where he received the Ph. D. in 1911. His teaching positions included an instructorship in Italian at Smith College (1908-1909), an associate professorship in Italian at Cornell University, where Livingston also supervised the Petrarch Catalogue (1910-1911), and an associate professorship in Romance Languages at Columbia University (1911-1917). Among the various honors bestowed upon Livingston were membership in Phi Beta Kappa and the Venetian academic society, the Reale deputazione veneta di storia patria; he was also decorated as a Cavalier of the Crown of Italy.

Livingston's desire to disseminate the work of leading European writers and thinkers in the United States led him to an editorship with the Foreign Press Bureau of the Committee on Public Information during World War I. When the war ended, Livingston, in partnership with Paul Kennaday and Ernest Poole, continued his efforts on behalf of foreign literature by founding the Foreign Press Service, an agency that represented foreign authors in English-language markets. Among the many authors whose work Livingston introduced in the United States were Octave Aubry, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Benedetto Croce, Claude Farrère, Guglielmo Ferrero, André Maurois, Alberto Moravia, Gaetano Mosca, Giovanni Papini, Vilfredo Pareto, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Guido da Verona. Livingston returned to academic life at Columbia University in 1925, where he was appointed full professor in 1935. Livingston died in 1944.

Among Livingston's scholarly work, two book-length studies stand out: the critical edition I sonetti morali ed amorosi di Gian Francesco Busenello (1911) and La vita veneziana nelle opere di Gian Francesco Busenello (1913). Livingston was also an accomplished translator, whose translations include Octave Aubry's Napoleon: Soldier and Emperor (1938), St. Helena (1936), and The Second Empire (1940); Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's The Borgias, or, At the Feet of Venus (1930), The Knight of the Virgin (1930), The Mayflower (1921), Mexico in Revolution (1920), A Novelist's Tour of the World (1926), The Phantom with Wings of Gold (1931), The Pope of the Sea (1927), The Torrent (1921), and Unknown Lands: The Story of Columbus (1929); Benedetto Croce's The Conduct of Life (1924); Claude Farrère's The House of the Secret (1923); Guglielmo Ferrero's The Seven Vices (1929); Alberto Moravia's Wheel of Fortune (1937); Vilfredo Pareto's The Mind and Society (1935); and Luigi Pirandello's Each in His Own Way and Two Other Plays (1923), The Late Mattia Pascal (1923), and The One-Act Plays of Luigi Pirandello (1928). In addition to book reviews and articles, which Livingston wrote throughout his career, a collection of criticism, Essays on Modern Italian Literature, was published posthumously in 1950.