The recent death of William Ayers Arrowsmith (1924–92) deprived literary life in America of one of its most brilliant men of letters. He was a teacher, a scholar, a poet and a translator, a classicist, an expert on drama, an educational theorist, and a virtuoso film critic. He was also an authority on modern Italian literature and a rebel against university education (with earned degrees from Princeton and Oxford and some ten others conferred honoris causa). Everywhere he went, Bill Arrowsmith won teaching awards; simply to list his scholarships and fellowships (e.g., the Prix de Rome, the Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Rockefeller) would take up this page; and his list of publications is a compendium of essential reading in the literary and cinematic arts. I thought that I had come to know Bill Arrowsmith rather well, but a recent issue of Arion devoted substantially to his life and accomplishments has shown me unfamiliar aspects of the man and writer whom I had tracked for nearly thirty years.

“Tracked” may seem an odd word choice, but it is an exact one. I first came across Bill Arrowsmith’s writings in the mid-1960s. I had just taken a doctorate in English at Chapel Hill and gone up to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was of course a tumultuous time in higher education. The war in Vietnam was raging and campuses were aflame with anti-war sentiment. Students, claiming that they were not being heard, staged sit-ins and teach-ins, and