FAMOUS, INFAMOUS, AND FICTITIOUS

"Go on deserving applause, and you will be sure to meet with it, and the way to deserve it is to be good, and to be industrious."

--Thomas Jefferson

Alumni of the University have earned the applause of their fellow citizens since Edgar Allan Poe first published Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827. In addition to Poe, the University numbers among its famous alumni President Woodrow Wilson, composer John Powell, poet Karl Shapiro, Admirals Richard Byrd and William F. Halsey, and author Julien Green whose novel Moira was set on University grounds. Perhaps more notorious locally was Joseph G. Semmes, the student who shot and killed Professor John A.G. Davis. As famed nationally as any of the illustrious names above were the fictitious Tarleton twins, Scarlett O'Hara's beaux, expelled from the University shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War.