Item 0025 - Letters, to M.P. King.

Writer and English Professor Odell Shepard was a mentor to Abbie Huston Evans during his brief term as an instructor of English at Harvard University and Radcliffe College in 1916-1917. His more extensive faculty tenure was as Goodwin Professor of English at Trinity College, Harford, Connecticut, from 1917-1946, and was later as a guest lecturer there from 1946-1966. He was also the Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1940-1943.

Shepard’s writing ranged from the academic, such as his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Bronson Alcott, Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Little, Brown, 1937) to his Book-of-the-Month selected novel, Jenkins’ Ear (Macmillan, 1951). Shepard also wrote collections of poetry, textbooks, essays, a fishing guide, and several histories. One of his histories, The Lore of the Unicorn, is a topic in one of Evans’s letters.

Odell Shepard died on July 19, 1967, in New London, Connecticut.