Paul Harold Kocher (April 23, 1907 – July 17, 1998) was an American scholar, writer, and professor of English. He wrote extensively on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien as well as on Elizabethan English drama, philosophy, religion, and medicine. His numerous publications include studies of Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon. He also authored books on the Franciscan missions of 18th- and 19th-century California.
Born Paul Harold Kocher in Trinidad, to German parents, he moved to New York City in 1919, later becoming a United States citizen. He attended Columbia University when very young, then pursued graduate study of law and literature at Stanford. After earning his doctorate, he taught in the United States and in England, retiring from the faculty of Stanford University in 1970. He was a recipient of fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and twice, in 1946 and 1955, from the Guggenheim Foundation.[1]
In 1973 Kocher won the Mythopoeic Society's Scholarship in Inkling Studies Award for his book on J. R. R. Tolkien, Master of Middle-Earth.[2] The book was published before The Silmarillion appeared (1977) to resolve several of the questions to which Kocher guesses the answer, usually correctly.[3]
