Jerome (Jerry) Wright Clinton (1937 – November 7, 2003) was a Ferdowsi scholar and professor of Persian language and literature at Princeton University.
Also notable are his "Esthetics by Implication: What Metaphors of Craft Tell us About the Unity of the Persian Qasida", (1979), and "Madness and Cure in the 1001 Nights: the Tale of Shahriyar and Shahrizad", (1985).
[2] In 2002 his rendition of the episode of Esfandiyar, published under the title of "In the Dragon's Claws", won the Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize.
In an obituary for Clinton, his colleague and close friend, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, writes: Jerry, a man of impeccable integrity and great decency, was a meticulous and impressively forward-looking scholar of Persian literature whose professional interests spanned literary theory and criticism, translation and translation theory, and in recent years, the esthetics of word-image relations.
Impressive as Jerry's scholarship was, it tends to pale before his vast humanity, his profound loyalty to his friends, and his ever-present habit of 'shekasteh nafsi' (the breaking of the self), which he had so well combined with American self-effacement.