Samuel Claggett Chew (August 31, 1888 – January 16, 1960) was a scholar of English literature and drama who taught at Bryn Mawr College.
He received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins in 1909 and earned the doctorate there in 1913: while at the university, he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
He wrote 3,000 book reviews in the field of English literature, many of them published in The New York Herald Tribune and The Nation.
His last book review, concerning a two-volume edition of Coleridge's letters,[4] appeared was printed in the Herald Tribune the same day as his obituary.
[5] In 1925 Chew won first prize, offered by The Saturday Review of Literature, for the best discussion of the way in which Joseph Conrad might have finished his fragmentary novel titled Suspense.
The next year he was elected to the American Philosophical Society; reviews of the era referred to Chew as an "eminent scholar".
[9] Erwin Panofsky, then teaching at Princeton, held a special lecture in honor of Chew's retirement from Bryn Mawr in 1954; the title was "Galileo as a Critic of the Arts".
[10] After his 1954 retirement as Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr, Chew continued to lecture occasionally at the college.