Pritchett, W. Kendrick 1909-2007 (William Kendrick Pritchett)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 14, 1909, in Atlanta, GA; died May 29, 2007. Historian, educator, and author. Pritchett was an authority on Greek culture and history. A 1929 graduate of Davidson College, he completed a master's degree at Duke University in 1931 and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1942 before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Attaining the rank of captain, he served in the South Pacific and in Germany, notably offering evidence at the Nuremburg trials against accused Nazis after the war. Returning home, he taught briefly at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and at Princeton before moving to Berkeley as an associate professor at the University of California. Pritchett would remain there for the remainder of his academic career, becoming a full professor of Greek in 1954 and chairing his department from 1966 to 1970. He was humanities research professor, too, from 1967 to 1968. An acclaimed scholar, Pritchett wrote books and papers on nearly every aspect of the ancient Greek world, including its military history, topography, methods of telling time, language, religion, politics, literature, and epigraphy. His most ambitious work is the five-volume The Greek State at War (1971-1991). Among his other titles are Ancient Athenian Calendars on Stone (1963), Dionysius of Halicarnassus: On Thucydides (1975), The Liar School of Herodotos (1993), Greek Archives, Cults, and Topography (1996), and Athenian Calendars and Ekklesias (2001).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), July 2, 2007, p. 62.