Education:
Harvard Military School (Los Angeles) (now Harvard School); A.B., Princeton, 1916; M.A., 1918; Ph.D., 1922.
Dissertation:
“Madness in Ancient Literature” (Princeton, 1922; published (Weimar: Wagner, 1924).
Professional Experience:
Instr. Latin, Princeton, 1922-3; asst. prof. classics, Brown, 1923-5; asst. prof. to assoc. prof., Yale, 1925-37.
Publications:
Scriptores Historiae Augustae, ed. & Trans. David Magie with the assistance of O’Brien-Moore (3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921, 1924, 1932); “Senatus” RE Suppl. VI(Stuttgart, 1935) cols. 660-800; “Senatus Consultum” RE Suppl. VI (Stuttgart 1935) cols. 800-812; “M. Tullius Cratippus, Priest of Rome, CIL III 399,” YCS 8 (1942) 23-49.
Notes:
Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore’s father was born Jeremiah Barlow Luddy in Ireland. He emigrated to America and married in Naugatuck, CT about 1877. He had two children but abandoned his family and turned up in 1880 having changed his name to J.B.L. O’Brien-Moore. His second wife’s father was Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, then an editor in New Orleans and Galveston, TX. The couple had a daughter, the Broadway and Hollywood actress Erin O’Brien-Moore (1902-1979). J.B.L. O’Brien-Moore died in 1906 in Los Angeles where his son was at the pre-eminent prep school, The Harvard School. His mother moved to Ireland and returned to Los Angeles shortly before she died in 1964.
Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore declared his nationality to be Irish. After graduating from Princeton, he went to France in 1917 to serve as an ambulance driver in World War I. He returned to Princeton the next year and received his doctorate with a thesis that treats forms of what the modern world considered madness from Homer through Seneca. Madness was often considered a god or at least a factual being, be it Lyssa, the Erinyes, or Amata among others.
His article on senatus in Pauly-Wissowa is a book-length 140 columns. It was translated into German by Ruth Keimer and the editor, Wilhelm Kroll. As a graduate student he began a collaboration with his professor David Magie on the Loeb Scriptores Historiae Augustae and is thanked in volume 1. SHA 1921/1924/1932.
While driving home after New Year’s Eve, his wife swerved to avoid an oncoming car, drove into a utility pole. O’Brien-Moore was killed at age 39.
Sources:
Princeton Alumni Weekly 37 (1937) 347; CW 30 (1937) 148.
