After earning a PhD from Harvard, and while a professor on staff there, Cedric Whitman wrote the book, Homer and the Heroic Tradition which won him a Christian Gauss Prize.
He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1947 and joined the faculty that year. In 1966, he became the first Jones Professor of Classic Literature. In 1974, Whitman became the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, a position he would serve until his death in 1979. His 1958 book, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, won him the Christian Gauss Prize. 
