Bernadotte Perrin papers

Bernadotte Perrin was born on September 15, 1847, in Goshen, Connecticut to Lavalette and Anna Eliza (Comstock) Perrin. Perrin graduated with his BA in 1869 from Yale College and was also a member of the Skull and Bones senior society that same year. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1873 in philology while also tutoring in Greek. Between 1874 and 1876 he served as assistant principal of Hartford High School, then left for Tubingen and Berlin, Germany, to continue his studies in Philology until 1878. From 1879 to 1881, he served in his former role of assistant principal at Hartford, and then accepted a professorship in Greek at Western Reserve College. He married his second-cousin Luella Perrin in Lafayette, Indiana on August 17, 1881, with whom he had two children, Lee James and Lester Williams. Luella died on July 25, 1889. He remarried on November 23, 1892, to Susan Lester in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1887 and 1890, he traveled abroad to England and Greece to conduct Greek archeological research. From 1893 to 1909, he served as a professor of Greek at Yale and professor emeritus. He became the first Lampson professor of Greek language and literature in 1901. Between 1898 and 1908, he served as public orator of Yale. Over the course of his career, he published and edited a number of books and articles in scientific journals on classical Greek history, including a translation of the book Plutarch’s Lives. He died of heart disease at the home of his brother in-law in Saratoga Springs, on August 30, 1920.