Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox (November 24, 1914 – July 22, 2010[1]) was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen.
[7][8] In 1939 he married an American, Betty Baur, a novelist who wrote under the pen name Bianca van Orden;[9] she died in 2006.
Bored with his first Army assignment with an anti-aircraft battery in England, Knox volunteered for work with the Office of Strategic Services as he spoke French and some German.
In the spring of 1945, he deployed to Italy with an OSS team to work with the Italian Partisans scouting for Allied forces.
It was here, during a firefight, where he was pinned down in a monastery filled with books that he resolved to take up his studies in the classics should he survive the war.
[12] In 1959 his translations of Oedipus Rex were used to produce a series of television films for Encyclopædia Britannica and the Massachusetts Council for the Humanities, featuring the cast of the Canadian Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
[3] Knox received the 1977 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for one of his New York Review pieces, a review of Andrei Şerban's controversial Lincoln Center production of Agamemnon;[18] the award committee described Knox's work as "a brilliant review of a major theatrical event" in which Knox "recognized that the director was attempting to solve the central problem of this play by finding a new way to express long passages of lyric language that have lost their immediacy for modern audiences.