William Filbert Bottiglia ’34 *48

Bill, who taught foreign literatures and linguistics at MIT for 35 years, with stints also at Princeton, Ripon, and St. Lawrence, and was author of the tetralogy Heroic Symphony, which Bill Selden praised for its "breadth of coverage of cultural, economic, political, sociological, and theological issues," died Aug. 19, 2005.

He lived in Needham, Mass., where he took care of his younger daughter, Jan, long disabled by a back injury. Thus not free to travel, he wrote a classmate, "I have brought the world to me with newspapers, magazines, LPs, CDs, and videotapes, with TV and radio, and of course with books. My LPs and CDs include more than 200 symphonies, and I own 128 (this is not a typo) operas on videotape."

Listed in Who's Who In America since 1966, Bill was appointed an officier in the Societe des Palmes Academiques in 1967 by the French government. Besides Heroic Symphony, Bill authored, among other works, Voltaire's 'Candide': Analysis of a Classic and Dante at MIT: A New Pedagogical Approach.

Bill was a widower since 1967, when his wife, Mildred McDonald, whom he married in 1943, died. His two daughters, Martha Morris and Janet Bottiglia, survive.

The Class of 1934