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Birth:          25 Jul 1920 Fergus Falls, Minn.
Death:          27 Dec 1975 Alameda, Cal.
Cause of Death: heart attack

Notes
!PUBL
www.gencircles.com/users/yochum
1930 in Duluth, Minn. as Elroy
25 Jan 2012 email from Alexandra Genetti via Keith Mole
prof of Greek at Berkeley, a scholar
had five children, including Alexandra Genetti
Cal Death Idx on ancestry
Bowers: The Years of Friendship with Elroy L. Bundy, 1967-1975) (11 Apr 2003)
http://texts.cdlib.org/view?
docId=hb1199n68c&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00010&toc.depth=1&toc.id=
Elroy Lorraine Bundy, Classics; Comparative Literature: Berkeley 
 1920-1975 
 Associate Professor 

The news of Roy Bundy's sudden death, the result of a massive heart attack two days 
after Christmas, reached many of his colleagues and friends at the annual meeting of 
the American Philological Association and stunned them. If Roy Bundy symbolized any 
one thing for those who knew him, it was supreme vitality--physical, mental, and 
spiritual. The scholarly world knew and admired him as the most creative student who 
had appeared in this century of the difficult Greek poet Pindar. His friends, students, 
and colleagues knew him better as a man of great personal magnetism, handsome, 
eloquent, and passionate; and accomplished athlete; an expert on California 
butterflies; a dedicated Hellenist, who possessed the most accurate sense of the 
nuances of ancient Greek; a teacher who could make dead Greek live for the most 
diverse set of students; a scholar who could build creatively on half-realized ideals of 
others and devise a new methodology for understanding literature; a poet and 
translator who commanded a unique skill in perceiving and explaining the apparent 
mysteries of the poet, above all the lyric poet... art. His loss is immense. 

Roy first came to California and the Bay Area during army service. Four years later in 
1946, when he was discharged, he decided to enroll at Berkeley, with the plan of 
earning a B.A. in English and then pursuing a career as a poet. Disappointed with 
what he found in his courses, he decided to begin Greek, then indeed to major in 
Greek as potentially more satisfying to his own poetic interests. Under the inspired 
teaching of Professors Linforth, Edelstein, and Cherniss, driven by his own aroused 
enthusiasm, he made rapid progress. At the age of twenty-eight, half his short life was 
over, but he had acquired a Berkeley B.A. in Greek. 

Hereafter Roy was committed to Greek and the academic life, and, except for a year 
at Princeton on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a year of teaching at the University 
of Washington, his career was bound up with Berkeley. Long an admirer of the art of 
Pindar, even before studying Greek, he produced a brilliant dissertation in 1954 which 
revealed the beginning of a revolutionary methodology for dealing with Pindar's 
notorious difficulties. As often happens, he was urged to revise the dissertation into 
book form. This he did; the book was accepted for publication, and Roy was given 
tenure in 1959. However, while working on this book, Roy's ideas on Pindar vastly 
matured. He came to see that, in order to understand a Pindaric ode, he needed to 
devise a new critical technique together with a new critical vocabulary that would 
deny, then reform the prejudices and expectations about lyric poetry which Hellenists 
had inherited from the nineteenth century. Rejecting the romantic emphasis on 
inspiration and ineffable emotion, Roy concentrated on defining the conventions, the 
identifiable rhetoric within which Pindar operated. As he tried out his new methodology 
on his seminar students, he could see how quickly their many problems with Pindar 
declined. Accordingly, convinced that the book no longer represented his current 
ideas, he made a shocking decision, one which few, if any, of his closest friends 
could comprehend: heedless of immediate personal advantages, he witheadrew his 
book! Instead, he set to work to distill the essence of his novel Pindaric methodology 
into two brief monographs, Studia Pindarica I and II (1962). On these two books, less 
than 100 pages of cogent presentation, an international reputation was slowly built. 

However, the first reactions of the older established Hellenists were not only cold and 
uncomprehending but also often caustic in disapproval. Other events were occurring 
at this same time in Roy's personal and scholarly life which, combined with the lack of 
recognition, made him, apparently at the peak of success, a disillusioned and unhappy 
man. He rapidly became an alcoholic, in more and more desperate straits, and many in 
his department, many of his closest friends, reluctantly gave him up for lost. But 
somehow he heroically asserted his will and halted his suicidal plunge. In 1968, as he 
succeeded in rebuilding his personal existence, the second phase of his scholarly 
career began. Ironically, the delayed recognition for his contributions to Pindaric 
interpretation now began to come, at first here and there in the United States and 
Germany, then in every study. But Roy had progressed beyond this and was working 
out for himself new goals. For a while, he returned to writing poetry as the most 
important thing. He began translating Pindar in the light of his new discoveries, yet 
trying to preserve poetic form. Finally, he glimpsed his mission in what might be called 
a creative exegesis of his own experience: how did Pindaric interpretation go astray? 

To understand what had happened to Pindar over the centuries, Bundy at age fifty 
commenced a crash program of self-education to master the ethical and aesthetic 
developments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance that link classical literature and 
modern criticism. He devoured difficult books, at the rate of fifteen per week. His 
energy and enthusiasm reawakened, he taught with a new ardor, discoursed with a 
new passion on the forgotten ideals of education and our current erroneous fads. New 
students came to him; a new feeling of confidence developed, based not only on what 
he had achieved and what had earned him fame (no longer desired) but also on fresh 
Pindaric projects, which, he felt, had even greater promise. He began to write and 
work on two books in which he intended first to established Pindar's position within 
the proper tradition to which the poet belonged, that of the rhapsode; and secondly, 
to account for the modern aesthetic sensibility which has so obstructed our 
understanding of Pindar and his culture. He was at work on these exciting plans, 
happy in his personal world again, with everything to live for, when death suddenly 
struck. 

Nobody who knew Roy Bundy will forget his dynamic presence; nobody who studies 
Pindar can ignore Roy's fundamental discoveries. In many ways, his life resembled 
that of the tragic heroes of whom Homer, Sophocles, and his beloved Pindar wrote: 
few understood him fully at the right time, many were troubled by him, but almost all at 
least vaguely sensed his greatness. 
W. S. Anderson L. A. Mackay A. Renoir 

Parents
BUNDY Arthur Cornelius (22 Jul 1887 - 21 Mar 1943)
MATTSON Sybil Frances (5 Sep 1900 - 12 Jun 1962)

Siblings
BUNDY Elroy Lorraine (25 Jul 1920 - 27 Dec 1975)
BUNDY Zelta Persis [CHG to Patricia] (27 Feb 1922 - 1973)
BUNDY Frances Mahala (16 Dec 1923 - 1979)
BUNDY Sharon Rae (21 Oct 1936 - 23 Oct 2009)

Marriage To SODERLING Eliene (3 Mar 1922 - 28 Dec 2007)
    m. 1942 Cal.

Notes

Parents
SODERLING Oscar Bernhard ()
CHELIN Ebba C. ()

Children by SODERLING Eliene 3 Mar 1922 - 28 Dec 2007
BUNDY Mahala Katherine ()
BUNDY Adam Cornelius ()

Marriage To ----- ----- ()
    m.  

Notes


Children by ----- ----- 
BUNDY ----- ()
BUNDY Alexandra ()

Marriage To KORPAN Barbara D. ()
    m. 25 Jan 1969 Alameda, Cal.

Notes


Children by KORPAN Barbara D. 
BUNDY Christian Edward ()

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