David Grene


David Grene was a professor of classics at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death. He was a co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought and is best known for his translations of ancient Greek literature.

Life

David Grene was born in Dublin. He earned his MA in 1936 at Trinity College. His translations include Herodotus' Histories, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Electra, and Philoctetes and Euripides's Hippolytus. Grene was a close friend and colleague of philosopher Allan Bloom and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.
One of Grene's memoirs, Of Farming and Classics, was published posthumously by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. From 1938 to 1961, he was married to Marjorie Glicksman Grene, the philosopher, who worked on the family farms, first in Illinois, and later in Ireland, as well as writing on existentialism; she was the mother of Ruth and Nicholas Grene.

Family

Ruth Grene is a professor of plant physiology at Virginia Tech. Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where his father took his first degree. After divorcing Marjorie, Grene married Ethel Weiss, and fathered the twins, Gregory Grene, and Andrew Grene, who was working for the United Nations when he died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake; Andrew's body was confirmed by the Department of Foreign Affairs on 19 January 2010 to have been found in the wreckage of Haiti's destroyed UN building. Grene had been meeting with the head of the UN in Haiti at the time of his death. The body of Andrew Grene was brought home to Belturbet, County Cavan on 30 January 2010 and buried beside his father after a funeral the following day. A charity, the Andrew Grene Foundation, has been set up in his memory.

Translations and edited works