Odell Shepard (July 22, 1884 in Sterling, Illinois – July 19, 1967 in New London, Connecticut) was an American professor, poet, and politician who was the 86th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1941 to 1943.^[1] He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938.^[2]

Shepard was born in Illinois. He graduated from Harvard University, and taught at the English department of Yale University. A professor of English at Trinity College from 1917 to 1946,^[3] he was a mentor to Abbie Huston Evans.^[4] He edited the works of Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Shepard wrote a biography of Bronson Alcott, the father of writer Louisa May Alcott and one of the foremost Transcendentalists: Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, published by Little, Brown in 1937,^[5] for which he won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.^[2]

His papers are held at Trinity College.^[3]

He died in 1967.

• 1938 Pulitzer Prize for his Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, (Little, Brown and Company)^[2]
• Golden Rose Award

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Odell Shepard

• A Lonely Flute. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1917. ISBN 9781437508536.
• The Harvest of a Quiet Eye: A Book of Digressions. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1927.
• Connecticut Past and Present. Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1939.
• Shepard, Odell (1930). The Lore of the Unicorn. George Allen. ISBN 978-1-4375-0853-6. reprint 2008
• Shepard, Odell (1928). The Joys of Forgetting: A Book of Bagatelles. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8369-1429-0. reprint 1969
• Shepard, Odell (1930). Thy Rod and Thy Creel. Globe Pequot. ISBN 978-0-8329-0364-9. reissue 1984

• Shepard, Odell (1937). Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. READ BOOKS. ISBN 978-1-4067-4410-1. reprint 2007

• Willard Shepard (1946). Holdfast Gaines. The Macmillan Company. Willard Shepard was the son of Odell Shepard.
• Willard Shepard (1951). Jenkins' Ear: A Narrative Attributed to Horace Walpole, Esq. Macmillan. Historical fiction about the War of Jenkins' Ear.

• Henry David Thoreau (1921). A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Scribner's.
• Essays of 1925. E.V. Mitchell. 1926.
• Essays of Today 1926–1927. Century Company. 1928.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1934). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Representative Selections. American Book Company.

• Works by Odell Shepard at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Odell Shepard at the Internet Archive
• Works by Odell Shepard at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Odell Shepard at Library of Congress, with 39 library catalog records