

The book was a critical and popular success.

In 1930, when she was sixty-three years old, she published The Greek Way, in which she presented parallels between life in ancient Greece and in modern times. After her retirement in 1922, she started writing and publishing scholarly articles on Greek drama. For the next twenty-six years, she directed the education of about four hundred girls per year. Hamilton returned to the United States in 1896 and accepted a position of the headmistress of the Bryn Mawr Preparatory School in Baltimore, Maryland. The following year, she and her sister Alice went to Germany and were the first women students at the universities of Munich and Leipzich. Hamilton's education continued at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut and at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1894 with an M.A. Her father began teaching her Latin when she was seven years old and soon added Greek, French and German to her curriculum. Praised throughout the world for its authority and lucidity, Mythology is Edith Hamilton's masterpiece-the standard by which all other books on mythology are measured.Įdith Hamilton, an educator, writer and a historian, was born Augin Dresden, Germany, of American parents and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. And we recognize reference points for countless works of art, literature, and cultural inquiry-from Freud's Oedipus complex to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas to Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. We discover the origins of the names of the constellations. We hear the tales of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Cupid and Psyche, and mighty King Midas. We follow the drama of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus. We meet the Greek gods on Olympus and Norse gods in Valhalla. The world-renowned classic that has enthralled and delighted millions of readers with its timeless tales of gods and heroes.Įdith Hamilton's Mythology succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture-the stories of gods and heroes that have inspired human creativity from antiquity to the present.
