[9] Cutting prepared at the Groton School, before entering Harvard University in the Autumn of 1896, where he graduated in 1900,[10] completing his courses in only "three years with the highest honors.
The Cuttings were friends of novelist Edith Wharton, who wrote, in memorial, the following about him:[12] "This ceaseless intellectual curiosity was fed by familiarity with many tongues.
It seemed to Bayard Cutting a perfectly natural and simple thing to learn a new language for the sake of reading a new book; and he did it, as the French say, 'in playing.'
While in Italy, Ambassador Lloyd Carpenter Griscom dispatched Cutting to Messina following the 1908 earthquake to establish a consulate and where he was one of the first foreigners to arrive.
[1] After denying reports of their engagement in February 1901,[13][14] Cutting was married to Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (1879–1943) at All Saints' Church in London, England on April 30, 1901.
Together, William and Lady Sybil were the parents of one daughter: After a ten-day illness, Cutting died of tuberculosis at age 31 on March 10, 1910, in Aswan, Egypt.
Before he died, he wrote to his wife that he wanted their young daughter, Iris, to grow up in Italy, "free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy.
[22] In 1910, a number of people jointly gave $25,000 to endow a Harvard fellowship "in memory of the late William Bayard Cutting, Jr., of New York, of the Class of 1900.