Content area
Full text
Warren E. Roberts (1924-99)
HENRY GLASSIE
Indiana University
Warren E. Roberts was born on 20 February 1924 in Norway, Maine. His father was a saw filer; he kept the big saws spinning in a mill that manufactured small objects out of the local wood. His mother, English by birth, was an accomplished singer of traditional songs.
Though his older brothers followed their father into the mill, Warren Roberts, the valedictorian of his high school class, always knew he would go to college. When the family followed the timber, leaving Maine for Oregon, Roberts entered Reed College in Portland.
At Reed, Roberts combined his interests in literature and music into a senior thesis on the ballad. Reed College had recently acquired a used copy of Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Intellectually contrary even then, Roberts read that the ballads were tragic, so he went through Child's collection, counting as he went, and proved that more of them were comic.
With that thesis, in 1948, began the career of a great folklorist. Roberts would elaborate his point in further study, contrasting the melodies ofthe comic and tragic ballads in a paper he presented at a conference when he was only 26. From Oregon, he wrote letters of inquiry to several universities. Receiving an encouraging reply from Stith Thompson at Indiana University, Roberts took the train to Indiana for graduate work in English.
In his second year of graduate study, Roberts was assigned the undergraduate courses in folklore, one a general introduction and the other on American folklore. That was 1949, so Warren Roberts taught at Indiana University for 45 years. At the time, Thompson, the author of a successful survey of world literature for undergraduates, was dean of the graduate school. The Folktale...