Elmer Truesdell Merrill (1860 – 20 April 1936) was an American Latin scholar, born at Millville, Massachusetts.
He is primarily remembered for his student edition of the Roman poet Catullus and for his studies on the text and tradition of the Letters of Pliny the Younger, culminating in his 1914 Teubner edition, which constituted an important basis for the works of later scholars.
Merrill taught at the Massachusetts State Normal School, Westfield, Massachusetts (1882–83), at Wesleyan University (1883–86), at University of Southern California (1887–88), again at Wesleyan (1888–1905) as professor of Latin language and literature, and at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (1905–08).
His effort was not well received by fellow Classicists, most notably the poet and scholar A. E. Housman, who offered a particularly scathing review.
[2] Merrill's student edition of Catullus remained a standard in American classrooms for much of the twentieth century.