Professor Walter Llewellyn Bullock (7 March 1890 – 19 February 1944) was a prominent member of the Bullock family, an English scholar, critic, teacher, lecturer and promoter of Italian Studies at the Universities of Chicago and Manchester where he was Serena Professor of Italian. He was founder, in 1937, and general editor of Italian Studies as the annual journal of the Society for Italian Studies. He left his exceptional collection of over 5,000 books and several hundred pamphlets including over 2,600 volumes printed between 1500 and c. 1625 and important critical editions of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, as well as many works on the Questione della Lingua to the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester. Family Bullock was born in London in 1890, the eldest son of Rev. Llewellyn Christopher Bullock and Cecil Spearman, daughter of Edmund Spearman C.M G. and Lady Maria Louisa Spearman (née FitzMaurice). Walter was the elder brother of Sir Christopher Bullock. Early life He was educated first at Liverpool College, where his father was a teacher, and then at Rugby School from 14 to 19 years old, leaving in 1909. Bullock then travelled to the United States, where he became a metallurgical chemist in a large malleable-iron metal factory for five years. He spent his spare time taking a drama course and writing and performing plays. He was a gifted actor and, when he entered Harvard University in 1913, he augmented his income-–he paid all his university expenses from his earnings as a tutor and out of scholarships won—by playing the leading man to Gertrude Kingston who had brought her repertory company to America in 1915 in a production of Shaw's plays. In 1917 he took both his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard. Due to rheumatic fever as a child, he had a weak heart and was refused admission by the British, Canadian and American armies. Wanting to make some contribution to the War, he travelled with a mission subsidised by Harvard to Russia and Romania. He was in Petrograd at the time of the Russian Revolution; present at the storming of the Winter Palace; saw the fall of Kerensky and was nearly burnt to death by Bolsheviks who set fire to the car in which he was out on rescue work with others on his mission. He was then sent to Romania where he worked for two years