Theodore Silverstein

He then served in the United States Army Air Forces as an intelligence officer from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, specializing in interrogating captured German and Italian pilots and analyzing intercepted Luftwaffe communications.

He both worked with and studied under literary scholars John Livingston Lowes, Edward Kennard Rand, and George Lyman Kittredge.

[7] He also published several works on Dante's The Divine Comedy, including its potential points of inspiration from the Apocalypse of Paul and the Visio Karoli Grossi.

[8] Despite his skill, Harvard did not offer him a tenured position; it has been speculated this might be related to informal Jewish quotas of the period that prevented "too many" Jews from being hired.

The unit even briefly requisitioned the Eiffel Tower for its work late in the war to better intercept German radio signals.

[6] Silverstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 in medieval literature;[10] this was enough to attract the interest of the University of Chicago, which hired him as an assistant professor of English in 1947.

His work as a medievalist was praised for showing the more cultured and respectable part of an era widely considered the "Dark Ages" to the public at the time.