“To an outsider, Eliot House is just another of Harvard’s eight masses of brick and steel. But buildings, particularly college buildings, have a way of impressing themselves on the minds and memories of those who live in them.”

– Harvard College Yearbook (1949)

Eliot House:
John Finley’s era of humanism at Harvard

“Where else but Harvard would you find the grandson of Matisse, the grandson of Joyce, and the great-great-grandson of God?”

John Finley’s offhand remark to a New York Times reporter in the 1950s brought to public attention the considerable glamour of Eliot House, the dormitory that would become known as “more Harvard than Harvard itself.” He was describing the suite which housed Paul Matisse, Stephen Joyce, and Sadruddin Aga Khan, a lineal descendant of the prophet Mohammed. (He would apologize to them afterwards).

Finley’s Eliot House brought together a cast of characters that would be improbable in a work of fiction. Early residents included Leonard Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Archibald Cox. Frank O’Hara roomed with Edward Gorey, and played Leonard Bernstein’s piano with John Ashbery. Other Houses had Pulitzer Prize winners; Eliot House had Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. himself. James Laughlin launched New Directions Publishing from his dorm room here, as did several founders and funders of The Paris Review, including George Plimpton and Donald Hall. Tom Lehrer’s music career was launched at an Eliot spring formal. In the dining hall, you might find young Malcolm X, writers William S. Burroughs and John Updike, burlesque dancer Irma the Body, and T.S. Eliot. Among the least likely residents of Eliot House were the student who would become the Unabomber, as well as the Beat poet Gregory Corso — who wasn’t even enrolled at Harvard but lived in a tent in a friend’s suite.

As a professor, Finley transformed philistines into philhellenes through his approach to the classics. He also reshaped American education after the Second World War in order to unify an increasingly diverse United States by offering a shared narrative, and to inoculate the country against the rise of authoritarianism from within. Concurrently, the public relations man Edward Bernays was spinning a very different national narrative. Their lives would later unexpectedly intersect, but Finley’s lessons feel all the more relevant today.

But as the master of Eliot House, he selected and stewarded the careers of his residents. His letters of recommendation were legendary for the opportunities they created. Under Finley, Eliot House received more Rhodes Scholarships than most colleges.

Eliot House celebrates the life and legacy of a remarkable figure who would be described as “a living embodiment of Harvard.” Many knew Finley’s magisterial public persona, but few knew the story of how he became this figure — or what he gave up in order to do so.