Mr. Kanigel proves the ideal synthesizer of Parry’s 'brief life and big idea.' If Milman Parry the man proves frustratingly enigmatic throughout this book, he nevertheless seems quite a character ... He met and recorded the traditional singers, or guslars, who performed their narrative poems accompanied on 'rude, raspy one-stringed gusles' ... The chapters recounting this work are Mr. Kanigel’s richest, full of character and incident ... Perhaps it was reading about Demodocus that set Parry on his course, rethinking what we mean by literature. This compelling book gives us the argument and the enigma of his unfinished life.

... the first full-scale account of Parry’s short life, mysterious demise and long-lived influence ... Despite his enormous influence—and an enormous archive—as a subject for biography Parry frustrates Kanigel and, frankly, me. His collected papers run to nearly 500 pages, and the recordings and transcripts he made number in the thousands. Yet his writing rarely strays from technical questions; in his interviews with singers he let his assistant do the talking. In Kanigel’s hands, we see him laughing at a Harvard student production of a Greek tragedy, complaining about bed lice and driving his muddy Ford through the back roads of the Balkans. But his inner life, the source of his scholarly drive — even what it was about the Greek epics that he loved so much — remain a mystery for reader and biographer alike ... In his work, Parry imagined a form of literature at once deeply traditional and uncannily modern, created not by a single genius standing at the head of the Western canon, but rather by hundreds or, perhaps, thousands of performers in venues big and small, composing and reworking songs for their audiences. If he himself resists biography, that may be only appropriate.

Such a life, such a career, and such a death seem almost beyond explanation. But Kanigel shows that, curiously, Parry’s research tackled a comparable problem. In telling the story of his life—and his atrocious marriage, hitherto not much discussed—Kanigel unites it with Parry’s work to frame a single, massive question: What’s the relationship between tradition and inspiration? ... Kanigel’s biography shows that those definitions have led historical lives of their own, through a portrait of a man who best embodied Hippocrates’ old axiom: 'Life is short, and art long'.

[A]s Robert Kanigel shows in the new biography Hearing Homer’s Song [Milman] Parry, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, had been seized by Homer, in much the same way that the deities in the Iliad seize their favorite humans ... But, as great as Parry’s accomplishment was, it’s not obvious that biography is the best genre for taking stock of it. Because he died almost a century ago, there is no one alive for Kanigel to interview, no new sources to unearth ... It is Parry’s consuming idea that is the real subject of Hearing Homer’s Song.

Kanigel has not had much to go on in attempting to portray the scholar’s inner life. There exist no intimate journals, apart from an early one that records Parry’s only trip to Greece, and many of the principal persons in Parry’s life are dead now. Parry’s professional life has been much easier to document, and Kanigel does a fine job filling in the details of a career in a scholarly discipline that is recherché and not particularly fascinating to most people ... Kanigel’s lively reconstruction of his experiences in the Balkans (he was there twice) makes for compelling reading ... It is hard to forget Kanigel’s description of an eighty-eight-year-old singer from Gacko, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who packed a pistol in his belt and sported a 'black band in his cap to mourn the Serb defeat at Kosovo in 1389.' That is a long memory in a sense altogether distinct from the memory for hexameters.

With penetrating insight and humanizing empathy, Kanigel recounts the labors of Parry’s traveling companion, Albert Lord, as he preserves, extends, and promulgates the epoch-making discovery of his now-departed mentor. Readers see how, through Lord, Parry’s breakthrough ultimately reorients not only classical studies, but also other fields that study works shaped by oral creativity—including Old English poems, medieval Spanish epics, and modern African American folk sermons. Scholars will appreciate the technical aspects of Parry and Lord’s accomplishment as 'literary archaeologists,' but readers of all sorts will value the personal drama.

This friction hovers like a dark shadow throughout, and Kanigel’s revelation that Marian has been considered a suspect in her husband’s mysterious death in 1935 creates an underlying quiver of suspense ... An engaging, thoroughly researched biography of a fascinating figure. Though some of the details surrounding Parry’s documentation techniques can feel a bit tedious at times, Kanigel has given readers a thoughtful look at a man whose theories have helped us to better understand the ancient world.

... gripping ...On the personal front, Kanigel delivers a fascinating account of Parry’s marriage and the mysterious circumstances around his death by gunshot shortly after his return from Yugoslavia (a handgun in his bag accidentally fired, though Kanigel also considers theories that it was suicide or that his wife shot him). Expertly weaving the personal and the academic, Kanigel movingly notes that Parry’s fixation on his theory and his inexorable work ethic drove a wedge between him and his wife. Meticulously researched and full of fascinating detail, this is a remarkable account.

Drawing on considerable archival sources, Kanigel recounts in thorough, engaging detail the life of Milman Parry ... As in previous books, Kanigel’s skill as a biographer is on full display, though general readers may get lost in some of the technical analysis ... A vivid chronicle of intellectual passion.