Odell Shepard Papers

Odell Shepard served as the Trinity College's James J. Goodwin Professor of English from 1917 until his resignation in 1946.

(William) Odell Shepard (1884-1967) was born in July 1884 into a Methodist minister’s family in Illinois, where the writing of New England transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau inspired Shepard at the age of nine. At age 16, he left home to study music at Northwestern School of Music, training as a pianist and pipe organist. Enrolling in 1904 at the University of Chicago, he completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. There he added a Master of Philosophy degree in 1908, the same year he married Mary Farwell Record. Their only child, Willard Odell Shepard, was born in 1914.

Interested in writing and music, he took jobs reporting and editing for newspapers, as well as one playing the organ for a church. Between 1909 and 1914, Shepard taught English as a professor at the University of Southern California. After moving to Massachusetts to attend graduate school at Harvard, he graduated with a PhD in 1916. Months after the United States entered World War I, in the spring of 1917, Dr. Shepard took up the inaugural James J. Goodwin Professorship of English at Trinity College. Speaking in a soft voice and nicknamed “Bard” by students, he taught Shakespeare, contemporary British literature, and American literature until 1946.

Shepard also served as Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut for two years, 1941-1942. In 1937, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Connecticut-born transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott entitled Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Among his other notable contributions to scholarship of American Literature, Shepard edited the works of Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He wrote several well-loved works for general readers such as The Lore of the Unicorn (1930) and Thy Rod and Thy Creel: a reflection on angling (1930). Publishing short pieces in various literary magazines and newspapers, Shepard reached the audiences of The Christian Science Monitor, Scribner’s Magazine, and other subscription magazines. Shepard’s love of the people and landscapes of Connecticut shines through his three compilations of essays and poems: The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1927), Cabin Down the Glen (written in the early 1930s, but unpublished until 2006), and Connecticut Past and Present (1939). In 1941, he attended and spoke at the first meeting of the Thoreau Society of America, the oldest organization devoted to an American author.

In 1946, at the age of 62, Professor Shepard felt worn out and asked for a sabbatical from the college’s administration. The request was apparently rejected, so he resigned his post as English Professor after nearly three decades in the classroom. That year Shepard co-authored, with his son Willard, the second of his two most popular books. They were the historical romances: Holdfast Gaines (1946), and Jenkins’ Ear (1951). He died in 1967.