One afternoon in 1935, Milman Parry, a 33-year-old scholar whose research would revolutionize the study of Ancient Greek poetry, was unpacking his suitcase at the Palms hotel in Los Angeles. According to his wife, Marian, Parry was naked from the waist up and rummaging through his clothes when he accidentally jostled a handgun tangled up in a shirt, which sent a bullet into his heart. Underneath a news photograph of Marian taken later that year, a caption read: “Mrs. Milman Parry, who was widowed in Los Angeles, recently, when her husband, in a tragic example of professorial absent-mindedness, accidentally shot himself to death.”
Or at least, as Robert Kanigel writes in his new biography, Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry, that’s the official version. Whether Milman Parry really died by absentmindedness, suicide, or mariticide—which we will never know, as he was cremated without an autopsy—he was definitely dead, and no longer able to explain himself.
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