Name George Grube | ||
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Died December 13, 1982, Toronto, Canada Books The Greek and Roman critics, Plato's thought, The drama of Euripides Education Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1925), University of Toronto, University of Cambridge Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada | ||
George Maximilian Antony Grube (3 August 1899 – 13 December 1982) was a Canadian scholar, university professor and democratic socialist political activist. Grube was a classicist and translator of Plato, Aristotle, Demetrius of Phaleron, Longinus and Marcus Aurelius. He was one of the founders of the New Democratic Party of Canada and ran unsuccessfully for election as an NDP candidate in Canadian federal elections.
He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on 3 August 1899, and was educated in the United Kingdom. He served as a translator for the Belgium Army, attached to the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War. He attended Cambridge University's Emmanuel College, where he received his Master's degree in 1925.
He moved to Canada in 1928, to begin his career as a professor of classics at the University of Trinity College in the University of Toronto (UofT). He became the head of the classics department in 1931. Grube was a socialist, and serving in World War I turned him into a passionate pacifist. During his tenure at the UofT, he was involved in the Toronto branch of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), serving as president from 1934-1935. When the LSR took control of the nearly bankrupt magazine, Canadian Forum, Grube became its editor from 1937 to 1941. It was during his tenure at the magazine that it became the main media outlet for the LSR's publications.
From 1944 to 1946, Grube was the President of the Ontario Co-operative Commonwealth Federation's (CCF) executive, often acting as the public spokesperson for the party after its leader, Ted Jolliffe, lost his seat in the Ontario general election on 4 June 1945. He also ran unsuccessfully several times for the House of Commons seat in what was then known as the Broadview electoral district during the 1940s.
In August 1961, he was one of the co-chairs presiding over the New Democratic Party's founding convention in Ottawa. In 1968, he won the Award of Merit from the American Philological Association (APA) for his 1965 book The Greek and Roman Critics. The APA gave him the award for "outstanding contribution to classical scholarship." Two-years later, while still the head of the classics department, he retired from UofT in 1970.
He continued writing new translations of Plato's works until his death. In his later years, he had health issues, and he finally succumbed to them in Toronto on 13 December 1982.