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On the fifth of February 1966, Donald F. Hyde died in New York. Only a
few weeks before, he had been elected a director of the Society at the annual
meeting. The members and directors had been looking forward to a long and
rewarding association with Donald Hyde, and his early death shocked and
saddens us all. His absence will be felt by the many scholars and societies
with whom Mr. Hyde had been associated during his extraordinarily active
life.
Donald Frizell Hyde was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on April 17, 1909. He
received his baccalaureate from Ohio State University in 1929, and from
Harvard an LL.B in 1932. In 1939 he was married to Mary Morley Crapo, and
in the following year he moved to New York and was admitted to the bar of
the state of New York. At the time of his death he was a partner in the law
firm of Brown, Hyde, and Dickerson.
Donald Hyde's association with us came after a number of years of
interest in and generous support of activities in the field of Classics. He was
a sustaining member of the Friends of The American Academy in Rome;
through his foundation, The Four Oaks Foundation, he supported many promising students through college and graduate school, and the first of that long
series is a classicist. The foundation was named from the Hyde estate in
Somerville, New Jersey, a 240 acre functioning farm. That estate had in turn
been named from the farm belonging to Mr. Hyde's father, Wilby Grimes Hyde,
a successful Ohio farmer and attorney, who had been an early automobile
enthusiast.
Mr. Hyde was one of America's most distinguished bibliophiles. His
unequalled collection of Johnsoniana is world famous, and together with his
wife he had assembled books and manuscripts of Oscar Wilde to make the
largest private collection in existence. In recent years he and his wife had
been building a collection of Japanese manuscripts, and that collection now
contains, among other items, imperial calligraphy of the 14th and 15th
centuries. The collections are housed at the Four Oaks Farm in an especially
constructed library. His interest in books brought him into close association
with the leading collectors and dealers in the world. He was a long time and
active member of the Grolier Club of New York, and had recently served as
President of that society. He had been a member of the council and President
of the Bibliographical Society of America. In his devotion to scholarship and
literary studies, he was a vigorous aid to publications in two important fields
of English Literature: he was a director of the Shakespeare Society of
America, and at various times served as Secretary, as Treasurer, and as a
director of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
