William Allan Neilson

William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-born Shakespeare scholar, professor of English at Harvard, and president of Smith College for twenty-two years, where he built it into one of the leading women’s colleges. He edited the Harvard Classics with Charles Eliot and, in 1914, assembled the Lectures on the Harvard Classics, the fifty-first volume, in which Harvard faculty introduce the set by subject, history, philosophy, poetry, drama, religion and the rest, so that a reader could find a way through the fifty volumes. It is the map the series drew of itself, and the lists assign it as such.