Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, professor, editor, and philologist, was possibly the leading classical scholar in nineteenth-century America. While teaching Latin and Greek at the University of Virginia and later at Johns Hopkins University he wrote textbooks, edited classical works, and wrote essays for various journals. As influential as he was in establishing classical studies in the United States, however, Gildersleeve made his greatest contribution to American letters by founding in 1880 the American Journal of Philology, which he edited until 1920.

He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Benjamin Gildersleeve, a Presbyterian pastor, and Emma Louisa Lanneau Gildersleeve. Although the young Gildersleeve received no formal education until he reached thirteen, he was a precocious child who, under the tutelage of his parents, especially a stern father, learned to read the Bible "from cover to cover" by his fifth birthday. According to his own account his boyhood education in the classics...