Prentice, William Kelly, 1871-1964

William Kelly Prentice was a Greek scholar and authority on classical inscriptions.

A member of the Princeton Class of 1892, he was an instructor (1892-1893) at the Lawrenceville School, N.J., before becoming a member of the Princeton University faculty in 1894 as an instructor in Greek. He retired from Princeton in 1940 as Ewing Professor of Greek Languages and Literature. Prentice participated in archaeological expeditions to Syria, served in World War I, and was the author of several books including THE ANCIENT GREEKS (1940), and EIGHT GENERATIONS: THE ANCESTRY, EDUCATION AND LIFE OF WILLIAM PACKER PRENTICE (1947). Prentice's father, William Packer Prentice (1834-1915), of Albany, New York, and "Mount Hope" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a graduate of Williams College (1855) and the University of Gottingen (1858), served in the American Civil War from 1861 to 1862 as chief-of-staff for Major-General O.M. Mitchell, then practiced as a lawyer in New York.