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Herrlee Creel
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Herrlee Glessner Creel (January 19, 1905-June 1, 1994) was an American sinologist and philosopher, and authority on Confucius. He was the Martin A. Ryerson Emeritus Distinguished Service Professor of Chinese History at the University of Chicago. Creel was regarded as a giant among specialists on early Chinese civilization, and was described in various circles as "the doyen of American sinologists".
Creel established the University of Chicago as a leading center of East Asian Studies.
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Encyclopedia
Herrlee Glessner Creel (January 19, 1905-June 1, 1994) was an American sinologist and philosopher, and authority on Confucius. He was the Martin A. Ryerson Emeritus Distinguished Service Professor of Chinese History at the University of Chicago. Creel was regarded as a giant among specialists on early Chinese civilization, and was described in various circles as "the doyen of American sinologists".
Creel established the University of Chicago as a leading center of East Asian Studies. His career was marked by the longevity of his publications. Although he published for half a century, most of his major books remained in print at the time of his death. The quality of his scholarship was accompanied by a prose style that was deemed to have high levels of cogency, lucidity, and grace that made his work easily accessible to the reader.
Early years
Creel was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 19, 1905. His entire tertiary education was at the University of Chicago. He earned his Bachelor of Philosophy in 1926, his M.A. in 1927 and his PhD 1929 in Chinese Philosophy. He began his postdoctoral career as an assistant professor of psychology at Lombard College from 1929 to 1930. He was awarded fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies (1930–1933), the Harvard-Yenching Institute (1931–1935), and the Rockefeller Foundation (1936, 1945 –1946). In 1936 he accepted a post at the University of Chicago, where he was an instructor in Chinese history and language from 1936 until he was appointed Assistant Professor of early Chinese literature and institutions in 1937. Creel was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1941 and full Professor in 1949. He served as a Lieutenant Colonel of military intelligence in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during the Second World War. He remained as a professor until 1964, when he became the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Chinese History until 1974).
Societies and publishing
Creel was a member of the Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, a member of its Committee on Far Eastern Studies, and the President of the American Oriental Society. He also held membership of the Association for Asian Studies and of the American Philosophical Society. The most influential of Creel’s books include The Birth of China (1936), the first detailed account on the significance of the archaeological excavations at Anyang, which quickly attracted global interest; Studies in Early Chinese Culture (1937) which was an influential collection of monographs; Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method, vols. 1-111 (1938-52), a groundbreaking and controversial, attempt to teach literary Chinese through carefully glossed excerpts from standard classical texts; Newspaper Chinese by the Inductive Method (1943), an effort to apply identical pedagogical techniques to the analysis of Chinese newspapers; Confucius, the Man and the Myth (1949), a critical analysis of the philosopher Confucius; Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (1953), a survey of Chinese thought; The Origins of Statecraft in China, Vol. 1: The Western Chou Empire (1970), a judicial account of the polity of the Western Chou dynasty; What is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (1970) and Shen Pu-hai:A Chinese Political Philosophy of the Fourth Century B.C. (1974), an important monograph on an obscure early Chinese specialist on administrative technique
Style
Creel came from a generation of sinologists who learnt Chinese before any of the modern language pedagogy techniques had been developed, and before there were any reliable dictionaries to assist an understanding of the classical Chinese, rather than modern Chinese, meaning of the Chinese characters in a particular text.
His insistence on introducing students to Chinese through the ancient classical texts, without prior exposure to the modern language, remains a point of controversy. Despite the controversy, at least one of his former students is profoundly grateful for the intellectual vigor and deep respect for the classical texts that this approach fostered. His arrival on the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1936 placed it prominently on the sinological map, where it has enjoyed a prominent place ever since.
Although Creel styled himself as a specialist on early Chinese history, the history of Chinese philosophy, and the history of Chinese ruling institutions, his scope of work was much broader, and included work in archaeology and anthropology; epigraphy, philology, and linguistics; cultural, intellectual, economic, and institutional history; and philosophy, literature and art.
Creel died at his home in Palos Park, Illinois, after a long illness, on June 1, 1994 at the age of 89.
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