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John Erskine (October 5, 1879 — June 2, 1951) was a U.S. educator and author, born in New York City and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University (A.M., 1901; Ph. D., 1903).

Professor Erskine was an English professor at Columbia from 1909 and 1937, and Amherst. He instituted Columbia College's General Honors Course, a two-year undergraduate seminar that would later help inspire "Masterworks of Western Literature," now known commonly as "Literature Humanities," the second component of Columbia College's Core Curriculum. This course taught the classics in translation instead of the original Latin or Greek. This course would later go on to inspire the Great Books movement, centered around the Great Books of the Western World.

In 1946 he served as the first chairman of the American Writers Association.

Erskine co-wrote the 1900 Varsity Show, The Governer's Vrouw, with poet Melville Cane. He won the Butler Medal in 1919.

Erskine Place, a street in the New York City borough of The Bronx, was named after him.

Erskine was also the author of numerous publications, including:

• The Elizabethan Lyric (1903)
• Selections from the Faerie Queene (1905)
• Act?on and Other Poems (1907)
• Leading American novelists (1910)
• Written English, with Helen Erskine (1910; revised edition, 1913)
• Selections from the Idylls of the King (1912)
• The Kinds of Poetry (1913)
• Poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, with W. P. Trent (1914)
• The Moral Obligation of the Intelligent, and Other Essays (1915)
• The Shadowed Hour (1917)
• Democracy and Ideals (1920)
• The Little Disciple (1923)
• Private Life of Helen of Troy (1925)
• Sonata (1925)
• Galahad (1926)
• Adam And Eve (1927)
• American Character (1927)
• Prohibition And Christianity, And Other Paradoxes (1927)
• The Delight Of Great Books (1928)
• Penelope's Man (1928)
• Sincerity (1929)
• Uncle Sam In The Eyes Of His Family (1930)
• Cinderella's Daughter, And Other Sequels And Consequences (1930)
• The Brief Hour Of Francois Villon (1937)
• The Start Of The Road (1938)

To commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of Roger Bacon, Erskine wroteA Pageant of the Thirteenth Century, a biographical play which was produced at Columbia University and published as a book by Columbia University Press in 1914. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Erskine", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0