Herrick, Robert, 1868-1938

Writer and professor of English. A.B., Harvard University, 1890. Instructor in rhetoric, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1890-1893. Instructor in rhetoric, University of Chicago, 1893-1895; assistant professor, 1895-1901; associate professor, 1901-1905; professor of English, 1905-1923. Government Secretary for the Virgin Islands, 1935-1938.

Educator and author.

Robert Herrick was an American author. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., graduated from Harvard in 1890, and taught at the University of Chicago until 1923. He wrote for the New republic and was an author of short stories and novels, reflecting pre-World War I realism.

Robert Herrick (1868-1938), novelist and professor of composition and literature, was born into the post-Civil War gentility of Cambridge, Massachusetts and died in the Virgin Islands, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal government. Of old New England stock, he was also educated in New England. He attended the Cambridge High School and in 1885 entered Harvard, where his mother's cousin George Herbert Palmer was Professor of Philosophy. At Harvard he studied under such men as Francis James Child, George Lyman Kittredge, William James, and Barrett Wendell, and while still an undergraduate published his first stories in the Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly. He was associated, either in friendship or through participation in the Monthly or the Mermaid Club, with such men as Philip Abbot, George Rice Carpenter, Jefferson Fletcher (who was to be his brother-in-law), Norman and Hutchins Hapgood, Bernard Berenson, George Pierce Baker, George Santayana, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Morss Lovett.

After graduation from Harvard in 1890, Herrick taught composition and literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1893, he accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago, where his cousin by marriage, Alice Freeman Palmer, was already established as the University's first Dean of Women. Here he developed a writing program similar to that taught at Harvard by A. S. Hill and Barrett Wendell, and was instrumental in persuading Robert Morss Lovett and William Vaughn Moody to join the English faculty.

In 1894, Herrick married his first cousin, Harriet Peabody Emery. The marriage was dissolved in 1916; and one son, Philip Herrick, survived his parents. In 1899, the Herricks acquired a lot at 5735 Lexington (now University) Avenue and in 1900, engaged Hugh M. Garden to design a home for them. The local press, chafing over Herrick's realistic descriptions of Chicago in The Web of Life (1900), ridiculed the project as intended to educate the taste of those accustomed to Chicago's "vulgarity;" but the house (now Calvert House) has come to be regarded as an important precursor of the "Prairie School" of architecture. In 1913, Herrick purchased a house and land in York Village, Maine; and this he regarded as his permanent home.

From 1909 to 1923, when he resigned his professorship, Herrick spent only part of each year at the University, the other part writing and traveling. In 1935, he was appointed Government Secretary for the Virgin Islands.

During his lifetime, he published three collections of short stories and twenty-one novels, several textbooks, and a study of World War I. He also wrote frequently for periodicals: short stories (several early ones published under the pseudonym of Austin Smith), literary and political essays, book reviews and editorials. In addition, during the period of World War I, he wrote a regular column for the Chicago Tribune.