George E. P. Mountcastle Memorial Lecture
The annual George E. P. Mountcastle Memorial Lecture brings a distinguished writer to Gilman School each year to give a formal address and spend a day in informal conversations with students and faculty. The lectures are delivered to an audience of Gilman students and faculty, invited friends and relatives of the Mountcastle family, and a limited number of students and faculty from other schools. The Mountcastle Lecture has been established and endowed at Gilman School as a memorial to George E. P. Mountcastle '68 by his family and friends.
George Mountcastle's strongest interest was in modern literature. As such, his family requested that most of those chosen to give the lectures be young writers. However, George was also concerned with the moral and ethical positions a man should take in an increasingly agnostic and secular world. Accordingly, in some years, a philosopher who has addressed him or herself to the dilemmas of modern man will deliver the lecture. Those who come to Gilman to deliver the George E. P. Mountcastle Memorial Lectures represent the kind of achievement toward which George was striving before his death.
WATCH THE 2024 MOUNTCASTLE LECTURE
José Olivarez, Poet (joseolivarez.com)
GEORGE E. P. MOUNTCASTLE '68
George Earl Pierpont Mountcastle was born in Baltimore on November 24, 1949, and died on October 12, 1969, while a sophomore at Harvard University. He was a young man of exceptional promise and achievement, as his record at Gilman School attests.
Coming from Calvert School in 1962, he was an accomplished athlete, scholar, and writer. He played varsity football and lacrosse during his junior and senior years; he was elected to cum laude in his junior year; he was an associate editor of the Cynosure; and among his other awards, he won the Armstrong Prize for Poetry at Commencement. He was also a valuable member of many organizations at the School, and his classmates voted him one of the "most likely to succeed." At Harvard, his specialty was modern literature, which is the reason his family and friends established the George E. P. Mountcastle Memorial Lectureship in his honor.