History of Tufts College, 1854-1896
Start, Alaric Bertrand
1896
FRANK P. GRAVES, PH. D.
| FRANK PIERREPONT GRAVES was born in Brooklyn, New York, July 23, 1869. His parents were from Massachusetts, his father being a graduate of Harvard College. His mother is a sister of Mrs. W. G. Tousey. He attended the public schools until he was fifteen years of age, when he entered the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute with the intention of finishing his preparation for college in three years. Being dissatisfied with the slow progress of his class, however, he left at the end of the second year, and having completed his preparation during the summer, entered Columbia College in the Fall of 1886. | |
At college he made a specialty of the classics, and received the highest prize in Latin in his Junior year. During his Senior year he acted as Instructor in Greek in the Drisler School, New York City, teaching twenty-five hours each week, while carrying a college programme of sixteen hours. In 1890 he received the degree of A. B., with highest honors in Latin and Greek. | |
Upon his graduation he was at once offered an instructorship in Latin or Greek at Columbia, but he at first declined, expecting to study law with his father. It required but one month in the office, however, to convince him that the law was not his vocation, and influenced by the success which had attended his teaching in the previous year, he accepted a second offer from his Alma Mater of an instructorship in Greek. He had charge of the Freshman class and of the classes in sight-reading for one year, at the end of which time he resigned to accept the offer of an instructorship at Tufts. He began his work at the Hill in the Fall of 1891, | |
142 | and soon almost all the courses in Greek were placed in his charge. In 1892 he was made Assistant Professor of Greek, and in 1893, Professor of Classical Philology. His success in the department has been of the highest order, the result of tact combined with great personal magnetism. |
Professor Graves received the degree of A. M. from Columbia in 1891, and that of Ph. D. from Boston University in the following year. He is the author of several books, among which may be mentioned "The Burial Customs of the Ancient Greeks," published in 1891, "The Philoctetes of Sophocles," published in 1893, and a "First Book in Greek," edited in conjunction with Dr. Hawes of Brooklyn, in 1895. He has also contributed many articles to different reviews and philological journals, and to the International Cyclopædia. He is a member of the New England Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools and of the American Philological Association, and was one of the founders of the Delta chapter of Massachusetts of Phi Beta Kappa. | |
Dr. Graves was married, December 18, 1895, to Miss Helen Hope Wadsworth, of Malden, Massachusetts, a graduate of Boston University in the class of ninety-one. | |
