'' in 1964, one of his scholarly research areas. Hymen Theodore Silverstein was born on October 11, 1904, to David Silverstein and Nellie Dobson in
Liverpool, England. His family emigrated to
Boston in 1910. He attended the
Boston Latin School, which gave him an early grounding in a
classical education. He attended nearby
Harvard University for both college and graduate studies. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1926, a
master's degree in 1927, and a
PhD in 1930. He also taught while a graduate student. He both worked with and studied under literary scholars
John Livingston Lowes,
Edward Kennard Rand, and
George Lyman Kittredge. In 1930, he married his first wife, Bertha Alexander. Much of his early scholarship was on the
Apocalypse of Paul, an apocryphal work attributed to
Paul the Apostle that was quite popular in the Middle Ages as a guide to how the
afterlife works, as it included tours of both
heaven and
hell. He also published several works on
Dante's
The Divine Comedy, including its potential points of inspiration from the Apocalypse of Paul and the
Visio Karoli Grossi. Despite his skill, Harvard did not offer him a
tenured position; it has been speculated this might be related to informal
Jewish quotas of the period that prevented "too many" Jews from being hired. In 1938, he left for the
University of Kansas City to take a position as assistant professor of English. this was enough to attract the interest of the
University of Chicago, which hired him as an assistant professor of English in 1947. His work as a medievalist was praised for showing the more cultured and respectable part of an era widely considered the
"Dark Ages" to the public at the time. ==Appraisal==