Bottiglia, William F. 1912–2005
Bottiglia, William F. 1912–2005
(William Filbert Bottiglia)
OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 23, 1912, in Bernardsville, NJ; died August 19, 2005, in Needham, MA. Educator and author. Bottiglia was a retired professor of Italian and French literature who was particularly noted for his studies on eighteenth-century French writer Voltaire. After completing a master's degree at Princeton University in 1935, he taught French and Italian there for five years. During World War II, he remained stateside as a general manager at the J. & S. Tool Company. in New Jersey. In 1948 he returned to academia as an assistant English professor at St. Lawrence University for a year. He then spent eight years as a professor and department chair in the Romance languages and literatures department at Ripon College. Bottiglia joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956, where he later became head of the department of foreign literatures and linguistics from 1964 to 1973, and professor of management and humanities at the Sloan School of Management in 1973. He retired from teaching in 1991. During his career, Bottiglia produced two books on Voltaire: Voltaire's Candide: Analysis of a Classic (1959; revised edition, 1964) and the edited Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays (1968). Later, from 1997 to 1999, he completed a four-volume novel titled Heroic Symphony.
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
MIT Tech Talk, September 21, 2005, p. 6.
ONLINE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology News Office Web site, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ (September 12, 2005).