William Allison Shimer

William Allison Shimer (1894-1983) was an American professor of philosophy. From 1932 to 1943 he served as the first editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's literary journal, The American Scholar. After a stint as president of Marietta College, he spent the latter part of his life teaching in Hawaii and working for the World Brotherhood, an international organization founded under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

Shimer was born in Freed, West Virginia in 1894, and in 1914 he graduated from the Glenville State Normal School (now Glenville State College) in Glenville, West Virginia. Continuing his education, he "worked his way through Harvard". A 1945 biographical sketch described him as having been a "West Virginia farm boy who dared start Harvard University with only $50 in his pocket, insufficient credits", and went on to complete "four and a half years' work . . . in three years' time while living in an unheated room, living on a dollar's worth of food a week, and working for 25 cents an hour at all kinds of jobs in order to keep alive." In 1917 he received his A.B. degree from Harvard.

Shimer subsequently received a master's degree from the University of Rochester (1922), followed by a second master's degree (1923) and a Ph.D. (1925) from Harvard, where he wrote his dissertation on "The History and Validity of the Concept of Relativity". He taught philosophy at Ohio State and at Bucknell, where he also served as dean of the faculty. He met his first wife, Edith Richmond, when he was a Harvard undergraduate and she was a Radcliffe student; according to a 1940 New Yorker magazine profile, she was responsible for his being elected to Phi Beta Kappa in absentia while he was away from Harvard during World War I.

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