Shanley, J. Lyndon (James Lyndon), 1910-1996

James Lyndon Shanley was born July 3, 1910 in Allenhurst, New Jersey, the son of John Francis and Elizabeth (O'Neil) Shanley. Shanley received his PhD from Princeton and worked briefly at Cornell before joining Northwestern's English Department faculty in 1936. His research interests focused on Chaucer, Spencer and Thoreau. Shanley retired from the University in 1978 and died in 1996.

As a seven year old Shanley went to the Montclair Academy for two years, then to a boarding school, Newman School, for six more years, where he excelled scholastically. He led his class in five out of those six years, and was second in the other. He graduated from Exeter in 1928, where he was the managing editor of The Exonian, the school paper. He entered Princeton in the Fall of 1928 and discovered poetry. In his senior year he wrote a thesis on Keats. He received his A.B. degree magna cum laude in 1932 and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1932 he enrolled in Harvard Law School, which he left in April 1933 to attend Graduate School at Princeton, having “decided I wanted to be a college or university teacher instead of a wealthy metropolitan lawyer.” He took his MA from Princeton in 1935, and received his Ph.D. in English in 1937, also from Princeton. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “Study of Spencer's Gentleman”, an account of the aims, training, and virtues Spencer thought necessary for the leaders of society.

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