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Overview
This biography of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) was published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1879. Its author, Sir Adolphus William Ward (1837–1924), a prominent scholar who became President of the British Academy, wrote on English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, translated Curtius' History of Greece, and was a historian of both Britain and Germany. He approached the task of writing Chaucer's life as a historian rather than as a literary critic, emphasising the archival sources from which information on Chaucer the man, the civil servant and the courtier could be drawn, and placing the life very much in the context of the times. An epilogue discusses the legacy of the 'father of English poetry' to the poets and dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the renewal of interest in Chaucer's works in the nineteenth century.