William Whittingham Lyman Jr - Life and Work

Life and Work

Lyman was born at Napa County, California, the son of William Whittingham Lyman and Mrs Sarah A. Nowland, and the grandson of Theodore Benedict Lyman. His father built the Lyman winery, now known as the El Molino winery. In 1905, whilst an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, he was convinced by Charles Mills Gayley to achieve an academic major in English literature. Upon completion of his Master's degree, Gayley arranged for him to receive a university fellowship to travel to the University of Oxford to study Celtic languages with Sir John Rhys. After a year at Oxford, Lyman spent two years at Harvard University studying the Irish language. He returned to the University of California, Berkeley to take up a post as Instructor in Celtic (then a tenure-track position) within the English department in 1911-1912. In the same year, Celtic appears on the list of approved majors in the College of Letters and Science and in the following year Lyman is named also as "Graduate Adviser" in Celtic. There he remained until 1922, whereupon he moved to Southern California and taught until his retirement. After retirement he and his family moved back to the family home at Bayles Mills, St Helena.

Commenting on his long life, Ruth Witt-Diamant declared him to be the "oldest living poet".

He was a poet of some renown, as mentioned by Josephine Miles:

"In a legendary time in the Greek Theater in Berkeley at the end of the first world war, poets gathered around the visitor Witter Bynner with a great sense of inventiveness and praise. Names I have heard from that time were Genevieve Taggard, Hidegarde Flanner, Eda Lou Walton, David Greenhood, Jack Lyman."

From preface to Taggard, Genevieve (1980). To The Natural World. Ahsahta Press. ISBN 0-916272-13-3.

At some point in his life he married the US poet Helen Hoyt.