Tyler, Royall, 1884-1953 (May 4, 1884 - Mar. 2, 1953), historian and League of Nations official, was born in Quincy, Mass. His father, William Royall Tyler, a grandson of Royall Tyler, first chief justice of Vermont and first American playwright, was principal of Adams Academy. His mother, Ellen Curtis Krebs, was the daughter of a Slovak homeopathic physician who had immigrated to Boston in 1850, and married a daughter of a family of successful Boston shipbuilders. When Tyler's father died in 1897, his mother went to Europe, leaving her son at Milton Academy. He joined her in 1898 and entered Harrow, where he spent four years. Early in 1900 Tyler's mother married Josiah Quincy, a former mayor of Boston, and took a house at Biarritz. During a visit to Venice that spring with his mother and stepfather, Tyler visited the Church of San Marco and experienced a vision of the beauty of Byzantine art that profoundly affected the remainder of his life.

Tyler entered New College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1902 but left during his fourth term for Salamanca, where he became a close friend of the rector of the university, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. After the death of his mother in January 1904, Tyler found himself alone in the world, free to follow any path suggested by his inquiring mind. Although he returned to the United States for visits during the next fifty years, Tyler's home was Europe. His closest friend was a slightly older American, Mildred Barnes, who shared his precocious intellectual interests and with whom he corresponded from 1902 until his death. After a period at Salamanca, Tyler studied in Germany; but by 1905 Paris had become his base. A remarkable linguist, he mastered French, Italian, Spanish, German, and eventually modern Greek and Hungarian. Although he attended the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris for a time, he took no degree anywhere but turned to an intensive...