Edward Payson Evans


Edward Payson Evans was an American scholar and linguist.

Biography

His father was a Welsh Presbyterian clergyman, who came to the United States with his wife around 1830. Edward P. Evans graduated from the University of Michigan in 1854, and then taught at an academy in Hernando, Mississippi, for one year. He then became a professor at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
From 1858 to 1862, he traveled abroad, and studied at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Munich.
On his return to the United States, he became professor of modern languages in the University of Michigan. In 1868, he married Elizabeth Edson Gibson. In 1870, Evans resigned his position at Michigan and went abroad again, where he gathered materials for a history of German literature, and also made a specialty of oriental languages. He became a fixture at the Royal Library in Munich, and joined the staff of the Allgemeine Zeitung in Munich in 1884.
When World War I broke out in 1914, he returned to the United States, where he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
He died at his home in New York on March 6, 1917.

Elizabeth Evans

Elizabeth Edson Gibson Evans, the daughter of Dr. Willard Putnam Gibson and Lucia Field Williams, married Edward Payson Evans in 1868. She was a contributor to Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, Nation, etc. Author of 9 books, including: A History of Religions, 1892; The Christ Myth, 1900.

Selected works

Articles