Castro, Americo

Castro, Americo (1885�2D1972), Emory L. Ford Professor of Spanish, divided a half�2Dcentury of scholarly work almost equally between Spain and the United States and, in the words of the citation for the honorary Doctor of Letters the University conferred on him in 1963, ``gracefully exemplified the union of [these] two great cultures.''

He was born of Spanish parents in Brazil and educated in Spain and France. He took his doctorate at the University of Madrid in 1911, and four years later won appointment through competitive examinations to its chair in the history of the Spanish language. In 1925 he published The Thought of Cer~vantes, a fundamental work that opened a new epoch in studies of the author of Don Quixote.

Castro was a strong supporter of the Spanish Republic when it was established in 1931, serving as its ambassador to Germany and also in its Council of Public Instruction and its Division of Cultural Relations. He left Spain when Franco rose to power in 1937 and, after teaching at the Universities of Wisconsin and Texas, accepted a call to Princeton in 1940.

Castro was regarded as one of the world's most distinguished Hispanists. His magnum opus, Spain in Her His~tory (1948), was considered a notable innovation in modern Spanish historiography. Written in Spanish, this work was later translated into English, Italian, German, French, and Japanese. He also earned international recognition as a teacher, serving as visiting professor at universities in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Germany, and throughout the United States.

According to his colleagues, Castro was unusually successful in solving the problem of teaching the literature of one land to students of another: ``Don Americo succeeded not only in making what was obscure intelligible, and what was alien understandable, but in arousing . . . fervor and enthusiasm. . . . This he was able to do not so much because of his extraordinary scholarly competence as because of his commitment to teaching as a priestly and prophetic calling.''

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).