Born in
Minter City, Mississippi, to an academic family, Kemp Malone graduated from
Emory College (as it then was) in 1907, with the ambition of mastering all the languages that impinged upon the development of
Middle English. He spent several years in Germany, Denmark and Iceland. When
World War I broke out, he served two years in the United States Army and was discharged with the rank of captain. Malone was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1945. He served as president of the
Modern Language Association, and other philological associations and was etymology editor of the
American College Dictionary, 1947. With
Louise Pound and
Arthur G. Kennedy, he founded the journal
American Speech, "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers". He resisted the views of Old English poetry as products of a purely
oral tradition. He contended that we must look to poets' individual elaboration of traditional structures: "A given poet was reckoned worthy if he handled with skill the stuff of which, by convention, poems must be made". His interests ranged from 10th-century manuscripts to the etymology of contemporary comic strip names. American speech, the English language, the historical
Arthur (his suggestion was the Roman
dux Lucius Artorius Castus),
Cædmon and
Beowulf (he edited a facsimile of the
Thorkelin transcripts, 1951),
Deor – all were subjects among his hundreds of publications. He edited and translated a large corpus of medieval poetry, including
Widsith from the
Exeter Book (1936). A sample of his production is a 1941 published book about old English poems, that were transferred into modern English alliterative verse. Rare books from his library, donated 1971 to
Emory University, are part of the Ancient and Medieval History (MARBL) collection, held at Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University Libraries. The Kemp Malone library content were fully registered under Call number Z997.M35. His literary heritage (30 document boxes) were deposited in 1983 at
Johns Hopkins University. The historian and biographer
Dumas Malone was his younger brother. ==References==