George Ticknor

George Ticknor (1791–1871) was an American scholar, the first great student of Spanish literature in the United States. Born in Boston and educated at Dartmouth, he studied at Göttingen and traveled in Europe, meeting Goethe, Byron and Scott, before becoming professor of French and Spanish at Harvard in 1819. He resigned in 1835, dissatisfied with the college's resistance to reform, and devoted himself to the three-volume History of Spanish Literature (1849), translated into Spanish and German and long the standard work. He was a founder of the Boston Public Library, to which he left his Spanish books, and wrote a life of his friend William Hickling Prescott.