Oral Tradition, 16/1 (2001): 58-84 Milman Parry and A. L. Kroeber: Americanist Anthropology and the Oral Homer

... was apparently arrived at by the reaction of an unusual mind to the text of Homer: nothing in Parry’s background (middle-class, not particularly intellectual, Welsh Quaker origins), nor in the place where he was born and lived until he went to France in 1923... makes that reaction likely. Parry’s teachers in Greek at the University of California included two of the finest Hellenists of their generation, George Calhoun (1888-1942) and Ivan Linforth (b. 1879). Both men knew Homer well and had a sensitive understanding of his poetry. But they were not the source of any of Parry’s specific ideas. His work was as much a surprise to them as to the rest of the world. The mind that presented Homer to the world as the singer of traditional poetry was itself the product of no traditions. A. Parry 1971:xxii-xxii