He had his early education at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in June 1894, to join Harvard University.

[17][18] His Little Clay Cart was enacted at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1907,[19] a production that included a real live elephant on stage.

[28] In fact, he was outspoken in his contempt for such articles, holding the view that Sanskrit ought to be studied not for philological reasons, but for the great literature it opened.

"[30] Perhaps for this reason, Time magazine described him as the "greatest Sanskrit student of his day",[31] and an Italian Sanskritist[32] said of him: "Ten men like that would make a civilization".

At a time when the university curriculum was undergoing upheavals, Ryder was a staunch defender of the traditional system of education in the classics.

In his ideal world, the university curriculum would have been mostly limited to Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with subjects like history, philosophy, physics, and languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, and French being allowed to serious students only later, as a sort of reward.

[2] When Anthony Boucher, who had been a student of his at Berkeley, wrote his novel The Case of the Seven of Calvary, he based the lead character of "Dr. Ashwin", professor of Sanskrit, after Ryder.

In 1933, Oppenheimer, then 29, was a young physics professor at Berkeley and studied Sanskrit under Ryder alongside enrolled students, doing assignments and recitation, and reading Kalidasa.

Later Oppenheimer cited it as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life, famously recalling the Gita at the Trinity test.

[40] He described his teacher thus:[31] "Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic ... a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation.