Alwin Thaler was born to Adolf and Rosa (Von Halle) Thaler in Hamburg, Germany on January 10, 1891. The family immigrated to the United States in 1900 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Thaler earned his B.A. from Adelphi College (1912), his M.A. from Columbia University (1914), his Ph.D. from Harvard (1918), and his Litt.D. from Adelphi University (1967). He married Harriet Page Albright (1895-1977) on August 14, 1920, and the couple had two children, Richard Winston (1925-1972) and Roderick Page (1927-1974). Thaler began his professional career as an Instructor in English at Adelphi University (1912-1913) and went on to work as an Instructor in English at Northwestern University (1913-1916), as a Sheldon Traveling Fellow at Harvard (1919-1920), and as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley (1920-1923) before coming to the University of Tennessee as a Professor of English. He continued to teach at U.T. until retiring in 1961. Thaler also served with the U.S. Navy during World War I, held visiting professorships at Stanford College (1925), Emory University (1961-1963), and Tennessee Wesleyan (1964), and served as a Guggenheim Traveling Fellow (1929-1930). He wrote a number of books during his career, including Shakespeare to Sheridan (1922), Shakespeare’s Silences (1929), Shakespeare and Democracy (1941), Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney (1947), Shakespeare and Our World (1966), and Ports and Happy Havens: An Autobiography (1974). Alwin Thaler died in Knoxville, Tennessee on November 2, 1977.